Top 10 Link Building Tips

An effective local site has 1000+ links aggregate from all search engines

1. 1. Know how many links you have currently. - go to Google and type in "link: www.yourdomainname.com" - this response will tell you how many links exist that point to your domain - look in the blue bar that says "results 1-10 of about xx". The xx is your link count. You can do similar request at Yahoo! using "linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com" - be sure there are no spaces.
2. 2. Make sure your site is registered on the search engines. Submission to the search engines is fast, showing up is slower. We do recommend submitting manually to the following engines:
   • Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
   • DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
   • Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters
   • Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
   • MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
3. 3. Link format - when possible, be sure your link looks like:
   
   
   The text contained in the link helps improve the relevancy of your site to that particular set of keywords.
4. 4. Look for obvious places for people to link to you. This could be web sites of friends, family or business acquaintances. If you are paying for advertising or a membership, be sure these include links to your business. Industry trade organizations, clients and vendors may also consider linking to you.
5. 5. Submit press releases. When you have even a little something to announce, doing so with an online press release can be very straightforward and help your link popularity. Check out www.prweb.com. You can also create a network of local press contacts and send those out. From time to time, these local sites will pick up the release for use in their web site content.
6. 6. Directory Listings. Directories such as CitySearch.com are a good place for link placement. The advertising you do here serves two purposes - 1) listing your business in an appropriate place for finding customers and 2) linking back to your web site.
7. 7. Blogging and BlogAds. Blogs are a good resource for links, especially if the blog is popular. Blogs are at the forefront of the social format of marketing. If you do not know folks with blogs, you can look into purchasing text links on blogs at www.blogads.com
8. 8. Understand HOW to link. Links are seemingly straightforward items, but consider link weighting (because most search algorithms do). Link weighting is wherein the quality and relevancy of the source linking to you is considered. One measure of quality is the Google PageRank of a site. This is a number from 1-10 that Google assigns based on the popularity of the site. You can see page rank by using the Google Toolbar. The links from higher page rank sites linking to lower page rank sites carry more weight. Links from lower to higher carry less weight.
9. 9. Reciprocal links between sites are not ideal. One way links carry more weight.
10. 10. Avoid link farms - showing up here can greatly impact your link popularity or even cause your site to be removed from the search engine. Tread very cautiously around link building companies - make sure you understand their distribution network.