Link building is one of the most essential parts of internet marketing and search engine optimisation. By gaining links to your site you will see your rankings increase, which will naturally bring you more traffic. There are many different ways of gaining links but the most effective ones are one-way links from web sites or directories that have relevant content.

The operative word in the title of this article is "MANUAL". People try to trick and get round the search engines by using automated software but at the end of the day the search engines make the rules and we have to follow them. By gaining good links manually you will ensure that they are all submitted correctly and at a steady pace. When link building, if you gain too many links to quickly then link based search engines will see this and dismiss the links to your site deeming them worthless which is a waste of your time and money.

Web directories

This is the best way to gain a base to your link building campaign helping you get your site cached faster, giving you initial traffic and links. This takes some time to do and unless you pay for this to be done all it will cost you is time. You can submit your link to directories and get good one-way links but don't forget to put your keywords in the title! This will help you gain rankings with less popular keywords and give you the foundations for ranking with competitive keywords or phrases. Web directories are launched and closed all the time so you should constantly check for new search engine friendly directories and ensure you have a constant and increasing amount of links to your site. Also a great benefit of directories is that there are niche directories which you can submit to. The advantage of this is the content and links around your link is more relevant, which can helps give the link more credibility.

Article directories

By submitting articles across the internet with relevant links you can gain some very effective links to your site. The obvious problem with article submission is the amount of time needed to create and submit your article but as with the web directories they dont charge you to submit your articles. There are many companies which will submit manually to the directories for you and give you reports so you can follow your articles. Some article directories allow you to have your keywords in the article linking directly back to your site giving you relevant one way links. In some article directories you can have as many as 3 direct links to your site in your article helping you optimise more than one keyword. Also the directories allow you to put a one-way link in the resource box helping you gain even more links.

Article submissions are very effective because you can dedicate a full page of content around your links, maximising the relevant content. The search engines see the link as very relevant and give it more credibility than just having a link from an unrelated site or a link from a page with a high link ratio compared to the amount content.

Link exchanging

This is a good way for site owners to swap links to gain some extra links and traffic. This can be done by simply having a links page on your web site and advertising the fact you are willing to exchange links. You need to make sure the web sites that are offering to link to you are cached in the search engines and are search engine friendly. You can also join networks between sites which all swap links to help gain better rankings and more traffic. In general the better the sites page ranking you are swapping with the more valuable the link is to you.

However you must remember not to get associated with a network of web sites that regular swap links between themselves because you never know what the search engines have up there sleeves in future updates.

Triangle linking

Triangle linking is a good way of exchanging links but still gain a one way link from a web site. This is achieved by a web site linking to your main site and then having a second site that can link to their site.

However you need to ensure that your 2 web sites are on different IP addresses, do not have duplicate content and are completely unassociated else your second site may be picked up as a gateway or as a duplicate web site, which will potentially ruin your rankings on both your web sites.

Paid links

If you have the budget and need to gain links from web sites that have good PR and traffic then you can purchase search engine friendly one way links from such web sites. By having a site with a higher page rank linking to your site it shows the search engines your site is important enough for good respected sites to link to you hence why it may be worth paying. This is not essential to do as you can gain good links from the other methods discussed. However, if your fighting for a competitive keyword then it may be essential to help you rank near the top.

Conclusion

Link building is an essential part of internet marketing and search engine optimisation. It requires a lot of time, investment, homework and you must get the essentials done first. Make sure your site has clean code and lots of content. Make sure you research your keywords and keyword density within your pages. Research you MetaData but keep it simple, don't stuff them full of keywords. Only then should you start your link building strategies and only then will you be successful.