What Link Building Methods Work Today?

What Link Building Methods Work Today?
By Adelaide Kwaning

Link building is the process of building back links. The more back links to your site, the higher you’ll rank on search engines, thus improving the money making potential of your website. There are a number of link building methods to employ, but when a specific method is abused, it no longer works. Therefore, a website merchant has to stay on top of what methods are still effective.

It’s important to know that each method works to a certain extent, so for the best results it is advised that you master a couple.

Article submission

Submitting articles to directories is still an excellent link building method. It provides you with 100% contextual back links that search engines love. You also get traffic for your site courtesy of the link in your author bio. You can take this a step further and publish your article on blogs, as a guest writer, or ezines. You do have to approach bloggers and website owners, but you get some control over where your article is published. You can even do article swaps, allowing you to gain content for your own website.

Social Bookmarking

About a year or so ago, social bookmarking was a much hotter way to gain back links. However, it cannot be ruled out since it’s still effective, if you can manage to pull together a good bookmarking site list. As an added bonus, you can gain traffic depending on the site you are using.

Directory Submission

This method used to be more effective, but it still works today to build links. The problem today is many of the directories are not highly regarded, and are basically a waste of time submitting to. However, a Yahoo link is considered a quality back link. The downside with Yahoo is the price. It charges a $300 yearly fee, and that does not guarantee approval of your site.

DMOZ is another directory worth looking into. It may take months being approved by them however. On the upside, because many small directories use DMOZ directory categories, being listed on DMOZ means being listed on other directories.

Submitting to other directors (other than the ones mentioned above) will help increase your back links. To judge the quality of the directory analyze the number of sites listed, number of back links the directory has, the page rank and the age of the directory.

Press Release

This is a great link building method, because it gives you relevant back links as well as lets you solidify your “brand” for your audience. You do however, have to create a list of good press release sites to submit to, which is in some cases is easier said than done.

Blog commenting

Because this method is associated with spamming, you need to work much harder at getting back links. You can improve your chances of having the blog comment stay on the blog, if you comment on sites related to your own and comment wisely. By this I mean, add real value by posting a comment with more substance than “nice post.”

A lot of people now are taking comments seriously, especially on review or consumer sites so taking the time to write a relevant post is beneficial to your link building campaign.

Social media

It’s no secret social media has become a popular link building method and that’s because it works. The great thing about this method is there are a lot of worthy sites. Here’s the catch, instead of spending hours building content for these sites, concentrate on building a rapport with the members of the social media sites. When you make friends with people on sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, and twitter, you stand a greater chance of being added to their list of recommended sites/people.

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Adelaide Kwaning is a ghostwriter that writes SEO articles to improve and increase traffic for her clients. You don’t have to be a client however, to get great tips on improving your website traffic and sales. Visit http://www.couchchange.blogspot.com/

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