Backlink Tool: How to Build Links to Your Small Business

Link building is one of the most time consuming aspects of marketing your small business online. If you want to rank in your city or state for a specific keyword, it is important to gain links from the community that you are targeting. Speaking at local events, hosting workshops, and submitting your website to local business directories are some of the best ways to build links to your local business.

The first step in building links to your small business is to create a site or blog related to your niche. Add relevant content about your products and services, build social media profiles, and let your customers know about your website. If you are on a tight budget, set up a blog and post fresh content regularly. Share your articles on social networking and social bookmarking websites.

Add your website to local directories. This is the first place where you should look for links. Make sure you submit your site to Google Places, Yellow Pages, Bing Local, as Yelp. Directory submission is a great way to build relevant links to your site and promote your business to a local audience. You can also use a backlink tool to get faster results. There are many programs and applications that can help you obtain quality links and boost traffic.

Make a list of local organizations and business associations in your city or state. Submit your website to the local chamber of commerce. If you get linked here, other companies and websites will use your data to write reviews and find information about the types of products you are offering. Search for company directories and submit your site there as well. Scan your network for backlinks that are easily attainable. By joining local organizations, you will get more customers and gain exposure for your business.

Another good way to get backlinks for your local business is to sponsor events, sports teams, and charities. You can help non-profit organizations raise money, support local activism groups, or donate products to schools. The companies that support charities and community events are usually listed on the organization's website and receive advertising by word of mouth. You can also sponsor local art shows, concerts, and business workshops. Focus on developing relationships with non-competing businesses in your area. Organize a monthly contest on your website. Get your business listed on review websites. These simple strategies will help you build relevant links and establish your online brand.

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Back Link Building: The Most Valuable Links

Webmasters have a bit of an obsession with getting as many links as they can for their sites. This really just goes to show that most of them really don't know what they are doing when it comes to search engine optimization. The goal is to get high quality links not to get as many as you can. Your time will be far better spent on going after the best links rather than trying to get thousands of low quality ones.

The most important thing, by far when it comes to assessing a links value is the site that it comes from. The quality of a site is largely determined by the links that it has pointing at it. The reason is that the computer algorithm that is used by the search engines to rank sites has no way of determining quality on its own. Instead it works on the assumption that sites that get links from other quality sites are themselves quality sites.

It is not enough for the link to come from a quality site, it also has to come from a relevant one. There is little reason for a site to link to another site that is on a topic that is completely unrelated. Therefore when it happens the search engines will just assume that it was put there for the purpose of getting a better search engine ranking. It is therefore important that you make sure that your links come from sites that are relevant to your site as far as possible.

The site that the link comes from is not the only factor that is used in assessing the quality of a link, where on the site it comes from is also relevant. The reason is that most sites have pages that are dedicated to providing links to other sites that are relevant, often there will be dozens of links on these pages. On blogs these links are often put in the side bar. These links do not have a lot of value simply because there are so many of them. Far more valuable are links that appear in the actual text of an article on the site, there are a lot fewer of them so they are worth more.

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind when you are trying to determine how much a link will be worth is how difficult it is to acquire. Links that are easy to get will have little value since everybody with a website will have gotten the same ones. If you can get a link that the average webmaster would not be able to get you will find that it is far more valuable.

Backlink Strategy: Successful Offline Backlinking Tips   Backlink Tool: What Is Anchor Text and Why Is It Important for Link Building?   Why Should I Care About Directory Guidelines?   

3-Way Links: Link Building That Google Loves

As an online marketer, you already know that Google rules the roost when it comes to getting traffic to your website. Your site must show up near the top of the results on Google when a user types a search term into the box if you hope to get visitors and shoppers to enter your web store. Since there are more than 8 billion websites on the Internet at last count, it is not that easy to be sure that the web crawlers that Google sends out will locate your site and boost it to the top of the list. One of the best ways to attract the attention of the Google-bots is to acquire a large number of one-way links that point to your site. So, what strategy should you use to gather those links?

Jonathan Leger is a marketing expert who has written several ebooks and developed a number of software products that were all designed to help marketers earn that crucial top-tier Google ranking. After extensive research and a lot of trial and error with his own sites, he has learned that there are three basis types of links that Google is looking for before it will bestow the honor of a good rank on your e-commerce business. In a nutshell, you need:

• Several different link texts. Google does not look kindly on hundreds and hundreds of links to your site that all have exactly the same text. In fact, you may actually be punished and put in the infamous Google "sandbox" if you have too many identical links. Jon Leger says his research shows that creating about 60% of your links with your top search term is good. He then recommends that you use a secondary keyword for about 30% of the links, and 10% for a third term. This method produces the kind of diversity of links that Google loves while keeping your main keywords in the forefront of your efforts.

• A gradual growth in links. The Google-gods will not be pleased if hundreds of new links to your site appear all at once. That is like a huge red flag that says, "These links are from spammy, poor quality link farms." There are some services and unscrupulous SEO experts out there that will do this kind of linking, and it is bad news for any business. Instead, a slow but steady growth in the number of links to your site is the ideal you should strive for.

• Links from many different geographic areas. Likewise, Google is not fond of links that all come from the same IP address, or even several different addresses that are too close together geographically. The best idea is to have incoming links from many different places all around the world.

Ok, so now that you know what Google wants, how do you as a marketer go about making sure Google is pleased? Jonathan Leger has created a product that can satisfy all of the criteria set forth by the search engine giant, and save you lots of time and effort in the process.

3 Way Links

When you sign up as a member of 3 Way Links, you will be joining a vast network of websites that are all looking for links the way you are. It is an easy process to join the program. All you have to do is add the domain you want to promote and your desired keywords into the system. Then, you upload a PHP file to your site from 3 Way Links, and make a link to that file from your home page. That's all you have to do. 3 Way Links then automatically creates links from other sites within the network that follow all the rules that Google sets out.

You will get links with several different texts, from many unique IP addresses, that build up gradually over the course of a few weeks. As an added bonus, none of the links will be simple reciprocal links that are usually ignored by web crawlers. Instead, they all involve three different sites where A links to B, and B links to C, while C links back to A. That way all the links are one-way and are smiled upon by Google. It is a terrific time saver for a busy web master, and a very effective strategy.

Cost

As a businessman, you are undoubtedly interested in the cost of such a valuable service. For $47 a month, you can put as many as 50 sites into the network and receive up to 250 links for each website. That's less than $1 per site per month. When you think of the potential for a return on your investment that is many times larger than your $47, the program sounds like a very good deal, indeed.

Backlink Strategy: Successful Offline Backlinking Tips   Backlink Tool: What Is Anchor Text and Why Is It Important for Link Building?   Why Should I Care About Directory Guidelines?   

Avoid NoFollow and Keep Your Links!

In the world of SEO and page ranking, it is common knowledge that links of all kinds are a key part of such an effort. Links going to and coming from a website create presence, credibility and offer more chances for indexing and page ranking. So it is crucial to ensure that all of them not only work but do not have "'nofollow'" connections as that completely negates any effort put into SEO for website and all connecting pages.

The html 'nofollow' command that is generally seen within the html code as '<i>link rel='nofollow'</i>' is a command created a number of years ago by Google as an attempt to combat comment spam which would flood blogs and websites from time to time. The command instructs search engines to ignore any connections displaying the 'nofollow' tag when searching pages and creating page rank indexes.

Link Functions In order for this to make sense, it needs to be understood how links work in general regarding indexing. Basically, search engines look for them, "follow" them to a destination, and then rank based on certain factors. These connections can be internal, going from one page on a website to another; links can also be external, going from one website to another one. Connection to an internet location with a higher assigned ranking value is very beneficial and lends credibility to an internet location. This makes it even more important to have good content and shared connections with other respectable online domains.

Spam Linking was established to allow genuine comments on a website to connect back to its originator, which was certainly good. Unfortunately, spammers used this connection to flood unsuspecting blogs with connections to their low-quality sites, creating trash coupling. This reduced the number of high-quality links and the value they provided and also associated a connection and its website/blog with low-quality traffic, eventually affecting the rank of a website, which is exactly the opposite of what is being attempted with good SEO. In many cases, the existence of spam links it is not realized so they aren't deleted. Additionally, many do not even realize that they have anything creating this problem, which is even worse, since they then do not get deleted. Worse yet, if a site has enough of these types of follows, it is possible the entire website could be banned from Google's indexes.

Combating Spam In order to combat this spamming and low-quality link value problem, Google created the 'nofollow' command; it told the search engines not to index a certain connection. While this was great for cutting down on spam, it also essentially eliminated any chance to gain good follows and the value they provided. So, while including 'nofollow' serves one purpose, it kills another which is the main issue with using 'nofollow'. Additionally, Google has since reported that they have learned that 'nofollow' does not actually prevent spamming in the way they had hoped.

Avoiding Spam The verdict is to not use 'nofollow' - ever. In order to avoid spam, there are a few recommended ways to accomplish this. All links should be checked to be sure that they work and go to the intended location. A periodic spam search is needed as well as consideration about installing a Captcha or other similar comment reducer. It would also help to consolidate website links so there are as few as possible with the remaining ones connecting to very relevant and valuable content.

This reinforces three important ideas in web building for page rank: doing good keyword research; having good content; and not using 'nofollow.' As long as incoming connections and comments are monitored for spam as mentioned above, removing all 'nofollow' links from blogs and sites should be beneficial for increasing page rank!

Backlink Strategy: Successful Offline Backlinking Tips   Backlink Tool: What Is Anchor Text and Why Is It Important for Link Building?   Why Should I Care About Directory Guidelines?