Effective Link Building

What are Links?
Links are other websites that link to your website. These are called 'incoming links', or 'backlinks'.
It is an effective tool to have other sites linking to you.

What is Link Building?
An effective link building program can include different types of links:
Reciprocal Links
Paid Links
One Way Links

The most effective link building is using one way links.
The major search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo) place a value on all incoming links to a website. Reciprocal links (trading links with another site) and paid links (paying another site to list your link) have lower value than one way links (another site lists your link, without trading or payment).
The reason for this is simple: The search engines know if you are paying for a link, or trading links. They consider it an artificial way to inflate the number of links pointing to a site.
Therefore, the most effective link building is with one way links.

One Way Link Building
Before you start finding links for your site, it would be prudent to have all your information together in one place, to expedite things.
Keep a document (using notepad or Word etc.) with all the following info. Then you can copy and paste from this document, without having to type everything out multiple times.

* Contact Name:
* Company Name:
* Address:
* Telephone:
* Toll-free:
* Fax:
* url address:
* e-mail address: Because submitting to links can generate junk mail, be sure to use a free web based email account such as yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. Some submissions do require an email with your domain however.
* Website Title Create a Title for your site. Some links will let you use keywords in the Title, instead of your company name. The Title is usually a 'clickable link', and is called the 'anchor text'.
* Description Create a description for your website, use your good keywords, as explained under the 'Description' section. It is best to have several different descriptions at hand.
* Keywords Create a list of keywords for your site.

How To Find Links
There are a plethora of ways to get good one way links to your site.
Using search engines to find links: Go to Google and type in your keywords, along with the word 'directory'.
Example: If your site sells furniture, then type in 'furniture directory' in Google (without the quotes).

You can see that one of the first results is for http://www.thefurnituremachine.com/.
This site has a furniture directory at http://www.thefurnituremachine.com/directory. You can add your furniture site here (click on the 'Add Url' link at the top left hand side): http://www.thefurnituremachine.com/addurl.html.
This is a one way link, and it's free. This site also lets you use keywords in the Title, so be sure to use keywords that you want to rank in the search engines with.

Another result is for http://www.furniturebymanufacturer.com/. If you go the bottom of their page, you can click on 'submit'. This will take you to http://www.furniturebymanufacturer.com/submit/. However, you will notice that this requires a reciprocal link, and is not what we want.

Another result is for http://www.furnitureswami.com/submit.php.
This site asks for a reciprocal link, but doesn't require it. Therefore, you should submit here.

Now you start to get the idea, effective link building can be accomplished with a bit of leg work, but is well worth your time, if you want to get visitors to your website.
Be sure to submit to only quality sites. Make sure your listing is in the right category, and not listed on the same page with unrelated links, such as 'shampoo ads' etc.

Static Links
When obtaining your one way links, it is best to get static links.
Static links are 'followed' by the search engines, which in turn give your link a 'vote'. Some links are 'indirect' or 'no-follow' links, which the search engines will not give you a 'vote' for. You can still list your site, since visitors can click on it and go to your site, but it won't help you with the search engines. One way to tell if a link is static is to put your mouse on the link. You should then see the address of the link in the bottom bar of your browser. If you see a url, then you know it is a static link. If you see something else (like a redirect url), or something other than a regular url, then that link is probably not a static link.

There you go! You now have a basis for an effective link building campaign. Good luck!