Top 4 Link Building Tips to Improve a Web Site’s Search Rankings

Whether you are just getting your Web site up and live online or you are looking to improve your current Web site’s visibility among the search engines, you will want to heed these important link building tips. Creating and finding quality one way links for your Website is crucial to increasing your position among all the search engines, yes, even the newest search engine, Bing. However, where do you find quality links and how does one create quality links for a Web site? These are the two most popular questions business owners and Web development companies alike ask SEO firms.

It does not matter whether your site has five pages or 1,000 pages, link building is paramount so your customers, clients and visitors find your company’s Web site before your competitor’s site. The first link building tip is to build quality keyword rich links within your Web site. Have you noticed that some link URLs have extremely long addresses that contain a string of random numbers, letters and other characters?

Yes, ones that look like this

“http://www.companyname.com/%ajioi>%3498uhy*99)00oplkh_%45%bn.html.”

These links do not contain keywords and they are not easily recognizable by the search engine spiders that it belongs to your industry. Instead try adding a specific keyword for each page on your Web site, such as “http://www.companyname.com/link-building-strategies.html.” This option allows search engine spiders to associate a particular buzz word to your company’s Website, thus increasing your rankings among the search engines.

Another on page link building tip is provide anchor links, which provide a link from one page to another by using a specific word or phrase. these anchor links usually appear in blue or bold within the content of your Web page. Anchor links provide another way for the search engine spiders to associate certain links to your Web site to other pages within your site. However, don’t overdo this process because the search engines will think that you are a spam site and this may result in negative consequences. A good link building tip is to provide one to two anchor links on each individual page of your site depending on the amount and quality of the content you have.

The second link building tip is to generate quality one way links from your site, and one of the easiest ways to accomplish this feat is to submit to SEO friendly business link directories. A list of the Top 50 or Top 100 Business Link Directories can be found through Google, Yahoo or even Bing. Business link directories, whether you manually submit or pay for a link building service, will undoubtedly increase not only your popularity online but also more people will be able to find your product or service because your Website will appear higher than your competitor’s site.

It is best to peruse the guidelines of a few of these business link directories as well as read the link descriptions provided, so you know what information they require and how to format your submission. Google and other search engines want to see quality links to your Web site that are not related to adult sites, gambling or other adult oriented activities. Look for SEO friendly link directories to get the best quality link to your Web site.

The third link building tip is to submit your Web site to several social bookmarking sites including Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Bukmark and make your bookmarks public so the search engines and other users can view your bookmarks. Once search engines find your Web site’s link on these social bookmarking sites, they will grant you higher rankings in search results. While other users can add your site to their bookmarks helping you achieve online popularity. With using social bookmarking sites, many have tags, categories and descriptions which you have an opportunity to include a popular buzz word that is also located on your Web site. Browse through several bookmarks created by other users to see how they have tagged their bookmarks and the descriptions they have written. You might even want to search for your competitors’ bookmarks to check out what and if they have done this as well.

The last best link building tip is to join more than one online social network such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter and provide a link to your Web site in your profile, discussion threads, group pages, and any other place where you can place a link. Setting up and maintaining a blog is also a good way to provide relevant links to your Web site, so the search engines see that you are building quality and ongoing links in many places online.

Additional link building tips and reminders are to frequently check that each Web page is working properly because a 404 error is not good for providing quality links. By providing some kind of analytics on your Web site will also help with tracking where your incoming links are originating. Another helpful tool is the “What GoogleBot Sees” report from Google because it shows the top 200 phrases that other Web sites have used to link to your site as well as comparing the content on your site.