Technology Reports

We all know that in order to build visitors that you need links to your site. There are lots of ways to build links to your site. Not all link building strategies are as effective as others and some may in fact be harmful. Over the years I have done a lot of link building and some of it is downright hard work!

I have experimented with several methods of building links and have come up with a reasonable strategey that works for me. It may not work for everyone, but It takes the minimal effort for the best results.

I start my link-building strategey for a new website by doing the following as soon as possible after launching a new website.

Phase I

• Set up 1 or 2 links from my existing sites pointing to the new website
• Do 3-10 link exchanges with other sites with a similar theme
• Write a blog post about the site with some links to inner pages of the site

At this point, I sit back and do no further link building for the next few weeks. I keep a close eye on the site stats and try and identify when the site is getting crawled by the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Only once the site is being crawled and indexed do I move onto the next phase. Once A site has been crawled and I can find more than the home page in the Search engines it is time to do several more things to give it a kick-start.

Phase II

Write at least 5 different articles about the website and include 3 links in each article with different anchor text and pages. In the past I used to submit these articles to various article directories but it is time-consuming work. What I do now is to seek out people with small to medium blog networks and pay to have the articles published. By small to medium, I mean someone who has up to about 20 blogs. I usually pay between $5 and $10 to have each article published to a different blog network. I spread out the posting of the articles over a week or so.

Finding quality blog networks to get your articles on is not a problem - the B/S/T forums at Digitalpoint are a good place to start.

I sometimes also pay to have 2-3 blog posts written about my site by other people - once again the cost can be between $3-$15 depending on the blog the post will be on.

During this phase is when I also do/get a few stumbles/digg’s of various pages of the website.

Phase III (optional)

This is the optional phase and I only do it on sites that I can see I will get a decent return on. This phase involves spending money. I purchase highly relavent and high quality text links on Related websites. This may mean spending between $5 and $20 (or more) per month per link. This can get very expensive very quickly - but it is very effective. I purchase links for 2 reasons. The first one being traffic - you guess the 2nd one

Phase IV

The Last phase in building links is your long-term strategy. This phase is only ever done once a website has a proven track record and I have decided that I am in for the long-haul. A website is usually 6 months old before I even consider this phase. This is where I get it submitted to free web directories - I either do it myself or pay someone to do it for me. Sometimes it is worthwhile paying from between $20-50 to have your site submitted to several (hundred) directories ( see my post on outsourcing for details).

I also get my site into some of the higher ranking directories at this stage as well - this usually comes at a cost. As long as you can get into a good, high ranking directory it is worth spending $10-$20 per directory to make it happen.

At this stage, your site is getting to be reasonably established and it should not trigger too many alarms if you get a lot of links in a short amount of time. I go back and write some more articles about my site and get them out onto bigger blog networks - I specifically target blog networks with between 20 and 100 blogs. I use the web stats and the SERPS to do my research for these articles - and target anchor text and specific pages of my site.

Once again, I don’t get them all done on the 1 day, but get 1 article posted and then wait about a week or so and do another one. It is worthwhile for you to get several articles posted on at least 5 different blog networks to give you a nice diverse range of links.

This strategey (if you skip phase III) will cost between $100-500 per site to promote and will result in a decent amount of backlinks. If your site is decent, by this stage it will be attracting natural links to it and you will just need to do the occasional article for a large blog network to keep things ticking along.