Link Building Builds Businesses Online by sending customers directly to your website via the links themselves, but more importantly by building confidence with the search engines.

The more links you have the more relevant your site will appear to the search engines and, as a result, they will rank your site higher than sites which they consider less relevant.

This sounds simple in theory, but of course there is a catch, or several to be honest !

Relevance

This is probably the most important factor when link building, as a link to a totally irrelevant site could actually have a negative effect on your search engine ranking but a link to a highly relevant site will greatly increase your ranking, and if you link to several highly relevant sites that are themselves already highly ranked you will hit the jackpot over time, but you must be patient!

The Hare and the Tortoise

Another consideration with link building is speed. Contrary to what you might think it is better to build your links slowly, as this will appear much more natural and therefore genuine to the search engines, and in fact you may be penalised by the search engines if you build your links too quickly!

Link Type

There are three main link types and each will be viewed differently by the search engines.

Outgoing Link

This type of link is very easy to acquire, but will possibly take visitors away from your site without them ever returning, and may even have a negative effect on your search engine ranking, at best they will have very little effect either way.

Reciprocal Link

This type of link is still relatively easy to acquire and although it is not considered as relevant to search engines as it used to be, it is still worth having - especially if the site you are swapping links with is highly relevant and highly ranked.

Incoming Link

Also known as a back link, this should be the preferred option in your linking strategy, but again aim to get back links from sites that are highly relevant and aim to get as many as possible over a period of time, in fact, in my opinion, you should aim to add at least one of these back links every week for the entire lifetime of your website.

Link Farms

These are websites that only exist to link to other websites, DO NOT use these sites as the search engines may ban your site for linking to them !

Directories

In the early days - register with as many directories as possible to get some links out there immediately!

Outsourcing

Many people choose to outsource link building - I would advise against this in the early days, and if you do eventually use this method, make sure that the outsource company are using a personal approach to link building and not using bulk spam email or link farms.

Timing

The best time to start link building is NOW !!!

Top Tip

Free back links with good anchor text from highly relevant high ranking sites with a .gov or.edu domain are excellent indicators of relevance in the eyes of the search engines!

Good Luck with your internet career.

Daniel R Stone

Daniel R Stone has been involved in offline business and sales and marketing since 1986. He has been studying online business and internet sales and marketing since 2003 and failed many times in his online endeavours until he finally discovered the formula for success ! After falling victim to many of the online scams - he wants to help other people cut through the smoke and mirrors and achieve their own online dreams, through solid, proven, sales and marketing techniques, adapted for online success in the 21st century! For more information and a genuine opportunity to make real money online he suggests you might want to visit http://www.EarningFromLearning.net

When you own an internet business, you will need to market this business using several different strategies. Linking is one of the more important strategies that you will need to use. Many people miss out on this importance. Linking strategies will definitely need to be incorporated into your online business. This article will outline how you can get the links you need, and how to do it in the proper way.

So, what linking strategies should you be using? There are a couple of different strategies that you can use for your linking. You will want to use all of them if you can but you don’t have to. The more strategies you use, the more links you will be able to get. Here are the different types of strategies that are being used every day by home business owners.

One: Reciprocal linking - This is when you trade links with another website owner. In other words, they put your link on their site and you put their link on your site. So, you are basically swapping links. You need to keep in mind that you only want to exchange links with websites which are relevant to your site. For example, if you have a website where you are selling toys, you don’t want to trade links with a website that is selling golf products.

Two: One way linking - This linking strategy is used by a lot of people because you put your link on someone else’s website and that is it. You don’t actually have to exchange links with anybody. Remember, make sure that your links are always relevant to your website.

Three: Inbound links that appear in the text of your website page. This linking strategy will always appear natural if you do it right. It is also one of the strategies of linking that is very effective.

These are not all of the linking strategies that you need to know and use for marketing your online business. They are the ones that are used the most by online business owners because they are very effective. One thing that you need to be aware of is that you want to have links pointing to your site to help raise the rank on your site. Quality links will be more important than the absolute quantity of links.

Do your link marketing at a slow and steady pace and use relevant sites with a good page rank. Gathering links too fast can get your site blacklisted and this can ruin your business before you ever get started. So, always make sure you learn all you can about linking strategies before you try it. Then you can start using the strategies for linking that will be the most effective for your business.

John Baril is a career Paramedic and also operates a successful online affiliate business. John lives in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with his wife and 2 young boys. Check out his outstanding free affiliate marketing e-course available at: Simple Work At Home Opportunity