How to Get Links: A Comprehensive Strategy for Beginners

Author: Scott Smigler

Article source: http://www.articlealley.com/. Used with author's permission.

If you've spent time researching ways to optimize your website to improve your search engine rankings, you've no doubt been introduced to the concept of link building. It's one of the most effective ways to improve your rankings. The challenge is that all links are not created equal. Here is your guide to success.

First, a little background:

Search engines like Google assess the number, relevance, and the quality of websites that link to yours. When another site links to yours, they are essentially "voting" for you. They are telling Google that your site has quality content and that it is a good resource for "something."

What's something? Well, if a website that talks about computer memory links to your website, that website is telling Google that you're a relevant resource for people who are looking for computer memory. The more websites like this computer memory site that link to you, the more of an authority Google will perceive you as being on this subject matter.

Yes, Google will assess the content on the websites that link to you, and will even look at the sites that link to the sites that link to you, to determine the quality of the votes that you're getting. The more of these votes you get from websites that Google considers relevant and authoritative, the greater your opportunity to improve your rankings in the search engines.

The million dollar question: How do you get these relevant sites to link to you?

There are many "approaches" to get sites to link to you. Before you start, however, consider Google's motive:

They don't want to see how good you are at getting links; they want to find out how important and relevant of a resource your website really is.

As a result, your challenge is to either:

Make your website a really good resource, or
Make Google think your website is a really good resource

If want optimal results, however, you'll do a combination of both.

Make your website a really good resource and over time you'll get good in-bound links to your website, and your rankings will climb. If you want to speed up the process, however, make your website a really good resource and then actively pursue links that appear to be "natural" rather than "forced" links. You'll still need to be patient; the goal is simply to push things along.

Active versus Passive link building

At the end of the day, and at a very high level, you get links one of two ways:

1) Passively - by having great tools on your site, and/or articles that give other sites a reason to link to you

2) Actively - by doing things like article syndication, link swaps, directory submissions, tagging, etc

To get the best of both worlds:

First - Takes steps towards making your website a real resource by doing things like: