Before I begin this post I just want to say that for those of you who are scared about losing traffic to the sites you are linking to, Get Over It!!

First of all, if you have any significant traffic to worry about this means that you must be building links. Second, if you provide valuable, quality, original content your visitors WILL not leave you, they may leave for a minute, but they will be back and they will appreciate you more for giving them valuable resources. Third, in reality you have to first have traffic in order to worry about losing any and you won’t have much traffic without an effective link building strategy.

Google Webmaster Tools says that in order to gain Page Rank (a way of gaging website authority, PR is gaged from 0-10, 10 being highest) you should have high quality sites linking to yours, which is termed a backlink. A backlink is simply a link to your website from another website.

There are several types of links and link building methods and all of them should be utilized to optimize your sites for SEO (search engine optimization) and increasing web site traffic especially when your site is new.

Just build links everyday! Link Building and Content are the two utmost priorities after launching your website.

1. Relevant/Reciprocal Link Exchange/Blogroll

This is where you exchange links with sites that are relevant to yours. In the eyes of Google relevance = quality as far as a backlink is concerned.

There are webmasters who exchange links with whatever site comes along, but think about this. If you have a website about computers, how helpful is it for your visitors to see a link to a weight loss site? This is a useless waste of time and looks lame on your website! Use common sense and build links for your visitors and not for ranks and your site will be rewarded.

Two Most Important Factors in Reciprocal Links – Relevance is number one and then Page Rank. If you can get both relevance and a high page rank then you’re set!

Webconfs Backlink Builder is a fantastic tool that finds relevant sites you can link to and presents them as hyperlinks in a handy list.

Also see SEO- How to Find Link Partners

Digital Point Forums are a great place to find link partners as well, just go to the thread on link exchanges.

Reciprocal Link Placement on your Website:

Where you place links on your site is important and can be done in several ways.

The Stale Old Links Page:

This is where you have a special page just for links and where links are placed one after the other. But, this technique is not the best option. These days search engines place less value on links pages and when you think about it, how good is a links page for your site and its visitors?

A better option is to place your links and get the reciprocal site to place links as hyperlinks within the content on your site (with relevant keywords). This method looks better, provides a natural flow of links and gets more link juice with the all mighty Google.

Home Page Links/Footer Links/Sitewides:

Also much better options than link pages and this is something that can entice higher page rank sites to want to trade with you when you site rank is lower than theirs.

The other day I was listening to an Internet Marketing Seminar where Aaron Wall, one of the top gurus of SEO and owner of SEOBook was speaking he made a statement that is a rule to live by for link placement: “

“The key to link building on your sites is to make the link look like a side effect and not the end goal!”

2. One Way Links

A one-way link is where you get a backlink to your site from another site without having to place a link back. Of course, one-way links hold the most juice with search engines. (But once again, just build links, especially when your is new.)

Natural One-Way Link Building through Content

One way to get one-way links is the natural link method which is obtained by posting fresh original content on your sites that is so good that other websites will want to link to it. Good content, which should all ready be a first priority for your visitors and visitor retention, will facilitate natural one-way links, but this takes time and for new sites this method will be slow going.

One-Ways with Link Bait

A great way to build one way backlinks is to use a link bait on your site. This is the method of choice to get get higher page rank sites to link to lower page rank sites. Link Bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. These link baits could be, information hooks, news hooks, humor hooks, tools hooks like a widget or some helpful tool that other sites can use.

Best and Easiest One-Ways – Article Marketing and Directories

Article Marketing and submitting your sites to Internet Directories are crucial to your link building efforts and very effective ways to get one-way links. Read my post, Article Marketing 101 And The Huge Internet Marketing Benefits, for the how-to’s of article marketing.

13 Ways To Link Building That Also Increase Web Traffic provides a list of concrete resources for all types of links.

Building a Lens on Squidoo is another great way to get a backlink and also a big way to promote your websites, here is the full how-to on Squidoo: How-To Squidoo – Steps to Building the Best Lens for Website Promotion

Social Bookmarks/Forum Signatures/Commenting on Blogs

More good one-way links can be obtained from submitting your content to social bookmark sites, many of which are do-follow. Participating in Forums that allow a link to your sites in the signature and commenting on do-follow blogs (where the link to your sites in the comment counts for link juice, are also great ways to get one-way links, and are great sources of direct traffic to your sites as well.

Time Division Formula for Link Building:
40% – Article Marketing
25% - Reciprocal Link Exchange
25% - Social Bookmark Links/Forum Sig links/Blog comment links
10% - Directories

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3. 3-Way Links

3-ways: Site A points to Site B and Site B points to Site C and Site C points back to Site A. The point is to try to make reciprocals look like one-ways, this method really doesn’t have much value and I for one don’t use this method.

4. Outbound Links

Outbound links are the websites you link to or site as references within content, or recommend as a service etc. Whatever your niche there was a point where you were learning and used helpful resources along the way and those are the sites that you want to tell your readers about.

Some webmasters are so afraid of losing traffic or giving up their link juice that you hardly ever see outbound links on their sites, this is a big mistake.

Outbound links are a necessary part of establishing your authority within your niche and a vital part of your Internet Marketing efforts. They are a vital part of any website/blog and their existence or non-existence can determine whether high-authority, high page rank sites would ever link to you, mainly because if you are not consistently seeking out new information and intelligence within your niche and citing those sources they will view your website as stale and out of date.

If you have read at least a few of my posts you will see many outbound links. Can you imagine my blog without them?

Take a look at other good sites you have visited they all have outbound links and references. It is impossible to provide really useful information without offering other sites that can benefit your visitors.

5. Internal Link Building

Sometimes this method of On-site Search Engine Optimization is overlooked but it is so crucial and should be a big part of your link building strategy.

I have written a separate post on the how-to’s of Internal Link Methods at: Internal Link Building for On-Site Search Engine Optimization

In conclusion, it is crucial for any Internet Marketing Campaign to build links everyday. This is the main way that Google can establish authority, relevance and importance of your websites and is at the center of the Search Engine Optimization (search engine optimization) strategy.

For more on how Google establishes relevance of your sites for your keywords through link building read my post at: The Importance of Anchor Text in Link Bulding

NOW, GO BUILD LINKS!!