Any business that engages in online marketing would like to increase the number of visitors (and thus potential customers) to their website. An effective link building campaign is an excellent way of achieving this goal, along with the added benefit that these extra visitors will be “warm” leads – that is, visitors who are specifically interested in what your business has to offer.

Link building is the process of increasing the number of links to your website from other websites. The more quality links to your website, the more popular your website will be in the search engines rankings. In regards to the quality of the links, two factors come into play, that of relevance (is the link from a site that also has content about the topic of the link?) and authority (is the link from a site that the search engines believe is an authority in that field?).

Here are some useful tips on getting started with your link building campaign:

Sources of Traffic
Firstly, analyse your statistics to understand the sources of traffic – your traffic sources may currently be a combination of free and paid traffic.  Find out how people are arriving at your website – is it mainly through paid sources of traffic or organic searches in Google? What keywords are they searching on to land on your website?

Develop Your Link Building Strategy
Once you have analysed your statistics and know where your traffic is coming from, decide on where your efforts would be best placed to maximise your link building efforts. One essential ingredient of a good link building strategy is to find relevant and authoritative websites to link to your website. Although the number of links to your website is an important aspect of a link building campaign, a small number of links from a relevant authority site will greatly outweigh lots of links from irrelevant or non-authority sites.

Choose the different methods that you will apply for your link building strategy – you could get links on other websites by leaving comments that contain a link to your own website on other people’s blogs, or by participating in forums and adding your URL to your signature. Other ways to obtain links are through getting inbound links from social media sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg or Reddit, or by submitting your URL to a business directory.

Backlinks Analysis
It’s essential that you monitor your link building campaign regularly. Use a tool like Yahoo! Site Explorer to find out what backlinks you are getting to your website and which sites the links are on. It will provide you with the information to assess progress with your link building efforts and allow you to refine your strategy for future link building strategies.

Assess your Competition
Understanding and assessing your competition – that is, the other authoritative sites for your industry – is also another important piece of information. Find out who the competition is linking to (and who is linking to them!) – it’s likely that you will be adopting a similar link building strategy to your competitors.

Link building campaigns can be time consuming to implement, but if you start out with an effective plan and work on it regularly, link building can pay huge dividends. You can very quickly rise above your competition and become the authority in your field with a solid link building strategy to increase your popularity with search engines, combined with a good online marketing campaign to take advantage of consumer word of mouth.

Tags: inbound links, linkbuilding, seo

About the author: Nita Teoh

Nita Teoh is the creator of Wired Web Writer, and enjoys helping businesses with their blogging, copywriting, marketing, and SEO.

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