Building links is an important part of driving traffic to your site. There are two main reasons for building links. Links build your online presence and page rank, and they can drive traffic to your website.

One of the major purposes of Building Links is to build your online presence and Page Rank. Simply put, the more inbound links you have going to your website, the more important google will rank you. (see Page Rank for more details)

There are a couple things to focus on when seeking links. First, a page rank of 3 or higher will send links to you that will help build your page rank (read more in the Page Rank Article). You also want to focus on the anchor text of the links.

Anchor text is the word or words that are linked to your site. If you are selling men’s scuba diving watches, then you would want the text that is linked to be “men’s scuba diving watches.” Often you will see “Click Here” as the anchor text. This doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help the page as much as it could either. It is a good practice to try to use your main keywords as anchor text in the links that you request from directories, reciprocal links, and other sources.

Submitting to Directories

The fastest way to find pages that will link to you is to submit to Live Directories. Live directories organize webpages into categories. A human editor, rather than a search engine bot will review the sites they admit to the directory and determine which category to place it in. Many people prefer live directories to search engines because a real person determines where pages belong. When you submit to live directories you need to keep in mind that a human editor will be looking at your webpage, so you must adhere to the submission guidelines. Here are some links to live directories you can submit to.

http://www.web-directories.ws/

Directory Submission guidelines

Directories all have their own unique set of guidelines that you should follow. But in general, you won’t have problems if you just describe your site without using marketing words. Remember, the primary purpose of submitting to Live directories is to get a link, not to convince its users to buy your product.

Remember to focus on Directories with a page rank 3 or higher, so that the link will help your site.

Reciprocal Linking

Another name for Reciprocal Linking is Link Trading. This was one of the first link building strategies that became popular. It is a good way to build relevant links, and you can control the anchor text of the link. When considering a potential link trading partner, remember a couple things about what linking means:

What is on the page you are sending people to? If you are sending visitors to a page that has your competitors links on it, you may be sending your customers to your competition.
What are the keywords on the page you are linking to? In the most recent analysis of search engine algorithms people have found that the content of the pages you link to will affect your page rank. They figure that your page is more relevant to your keywords, only if you link to pages that focus on the same keywords.

Writing Articles

Article directories, and Press Releases are great places to get links. These strategies do take more thought, but often times, writing articles create higher quality links. Basically what you do is write an article about whatever topic you are looking for links about. If you want links for Scuba Diving Watches, you would write an article about scuba diving watches. Within the body of the article you will want to create a link back to your site.

Then you can post your article to article directories where people go to find articles for their sites, blogs, or magazines. Then, when they pick up your article for use, they also place the link back to your site. Each time this happens you get a new link.

Here is a list of article directory sites you can use:

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.webpronews.com
http://site-reference.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.topica.com/lists/free_articles
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.articles.web.com
http://articles.easywordpress.com
http://articles.directorygold.com
http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/
http://content.infowizards.com
http://www.articlefriendly.com
http://www.articlewheel.com/
http://www.top-affiliate.com/articles
http://www.articles-hub.com
http://nero.byethost15.com
http://www.submityournewarticle.com
http://www.articlerich.com
http://www.articlecafe.net
http://www.your-free-satellite.com/index-2.html
http://www.add-articles.com
http://www.articleblotter.com
http://www.1articleworld.com
http://www.abcarticledirectory.com/
http://www.earticlesonline.com
http://www.earticlesonline.com
http://www.article.com
http://www.articlesnatch.com
http://www.talkinmince.com
http://www.JustArticles.com/
http://www.article-buzz.com/
http://freezinesite.com
http://www.tips.com.my

Other Strategies:

This is just the beginning of what you can do to build links. As we get into more advanced strategies we will cover more about link building, and more advanced methods of determining the value of a link. Be sure to look for other sources of links that pop up. Some other major sources are blogs, forums, and Social networking sites. Read the respective articles to learn more about the strategy.

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