Link Building For Beginners

Link building is an integral part of any webmaster’s online activities even though it is the one of the most time consuming and tiring tasks for webmasters. Link building refers to the process of acquiring incoming links from other websites to boost your website rankings in the search engines. When your site has a lot of incoming links from quality sites, your website be deemed as trustworthy and will be place higher in the search engines giving you a bigger pie of the organic traffic from search engines.

If you are new to link building, just understand that a link coming from a quality site is deem more useful than a few links coming from inferior sites. For example, a link coming from a PR4 (Page Rank) site will be considered by Google to be better than 10 links coming from 10 PR1 sites. Having quality incoming links will give a quick boost to your SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) placement, especially in Google.

However, even though quality links are very important, it is also difficult to get a lot of quality links initially. This is why it is important for you to build links of all sorts and types, regardless of page rank. There are many ways to build links and I have listed down some common methods which you can start building links for a start.

Article Submission
Submitting articles to article directories is one way of building one way links and driving traffic to your site at the same time. Many articles directories are highly placed in the search engines. When your articles are approved and published, most likely your article will get indexed within 24 hours or less, giving you another quality link to boot.

Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs is also another good way to get more links and also drive traffic to your site. Just make sure your not spamming other people’s blog just for the sake of getting some links. The trick is to provide decent comments on the posts.

Directory Submission
Submitting to quality website directories will provide you with quality incoming links for a start. This should be your initial link building method when you are starting a new site. There are both paid and free directory submissions but the frankly for me, the free directory submission will be more than enough for a start.

Forum Signatures
This is another popular method to build links and drive traffic at the same time. Most forums will allow registered users to include links in their signatures and when you make a post; your signature together with your links will appear underneath your posting, giving you another link. The more you post, the more links you will have pointing back to your site. Same as blog comments, the key is not to spam the forum but make intelligent postings.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a relative new way to build links by bookmarking or submitting your content or web pages to social bookmarking sites. This is a good way to boost traffic and build quality links at the same time as a lot of social bookmarking sites have high PR.

As you can see, the methods listed above are more than enough to get you busy for an extended period of time. There are some tools and software that can give you a head-start and save you much time in building links. I have used Article Post Robot, Auto Social Poster and Directory Submitter for my link building efforts and I can say that these are the few tools and software that can really help you a lot. There are some other advance methods of building links which I will talk about another day in another post but for now, these methods will be good enough for you.