10 Link Building Strategies for Higher Search Engine Rankings

When it comes to search engine optimization, getting other websites to link to your website is the most important factor in achieving top search engine rankings. Here is a list of 10 link building strategies which you should be implementing for top search engine rankings (in no particular order):

1. Write quality articles – write quality articles that other websites will want to post on their websites and link to. The higher the quality of the article, the more one-way links you’ll get. The best articles to write are ‘how-to’ and informational articles. Stay away from self-promotion.

2. Start a Wordpress blog – setup a Wordpress blog on your website and post articles to it once per week. It’s a great way to build the size of your website, keep your website content fresh and get incoming links. Plus Google loves Wordpress!

3. Syndicate your articles online – take the articles that you’ve posted to your blog and syndicate them on article directories such as Ezine Articles and Go Articles, so that other website owners can post them on their websites.

4. Submit your website to online directories – submit your website to free SEO friendly website directories for a quick way to start building one-way links to your website.

5. Submit your blog to blog directories – use RSS Submit software to submit your blog to blog directories. Use both the automatic and manual submission tools.

6. Exchange links with relevant websites – exchange links with high quality, relevant websites in your field. This can be extremely powerful, as long as you are very selective with whom you exchange links with.

7. Use social bookmarking – submit your blog posts and other high value content to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Aside from the one-way link you’ll get and the (short-term) top Google ranking, you can hit the ‘jackpot’ by getting to the first page of digg.com, where you’ll receive thousands of one-way links.

8. Syndicate press releases online – write newsworthy press releases and syndicate them online at press release syndication sites such as PRWeb. If the release is good enough, you can get a lot of one-way links to your site.

9. Post comments on industry blogs – post high value comments on other blogs in your industry to spark discussion. Even if the comments are ‘nofollowed’, you can still get links to your site from other bloggers that refer to your posts.

10. Link between your web pages – use contextual links in your website copy to link to other pages within your websites. Each of your pages should have some PageRank, so why not maximise it?

Do you have any other link building strategies?

Then post them in the comments section below.

34 comments

  1. Julia from Fast Blog Finder says:

    Thank you for the article. It’s great and informative. It seems you described all known link building strategies.

    May 16th, 2008 at 3:26 am

  2. ben says:

    it’s great

    May 28th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

  3. Search Engine Optimisation Consultant says:

    Hey,

    Great article,

    You really cut to the core about what its all about.

    Linking strategy is so often overlooked by small businesses.

    May 28th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

  4. Jason Fulton says:

    Top article on link building. You touched on a few things i didn’t know about. Thanks for the info.

    Regards

    Jason

    June 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 am

  5. WEB DESIGNER PERTH says:

    I’ve recently started following Google’s blog and although hints and tips are rarely explicit (people ask and get vagueish answers) link building - or making your site part of a relevant network of resources for searchers) - is imperative. Great article - concise and to the point.

    June 4th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

  6. Antondrive says:

    I’m impressed! In addition to the above strategies, I have not seen a method on how to build a widget for your website. A widget is a little software application, like a game with a link to your website, that you distribute over the Web. Made popular by Facebook, widgets are now a hot new marketing tool that have been known to boost a site’s page views by more than 300 percent.

    June 5th, 2008 at 8:05 pm

  7. Christine says:

    Thanks for the article!
    It’s really informative and clear. =)

    June 13th, 2008 at 10:21 am

  8. Nick Grinberg says:

    In regards to number 7 - http://www.socialmarker.com greatly reduces the time required to submit to all your social bookmarking sites.

    June 14th, 2008 at 4:26 am

  9. Heri on bestonlinelaptop.com says:

    inspiring tips, enough clear for a beginner just like me.
    ps: how to download both of free report above? i can’t get web design report yet.
    thanks.

    June 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am

  10. Website Design Guy says:

    Thanks for the article Alex - and thanks too to Nick for that link.

    June 21st, 2008 at 8:07 pm

  11. Nathan Sinnott says:

    Great, easy to use beginners guide for link building strategies.

    June 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am

  12. John says:

    These are really concentrated ways to promote a business into a successful status.

    July 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 pm

  13. Scott says:

    Great article. All the strategies given in are very useful and specially for the beginners in the online money making industry.

    July 23rd, 2008 at 2:38 am

  14. Mark says:

    This too is very informative post, as getting a higher search engine rank is very much important for driving traffic on internet so this post would be very much helpful for every one to get high search engine rank.

    July 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 am

  15. Frank says:

    Good Article Alex…but how do i improve my page rank.Thank you

    August 15th, 2008 at 3:46 am

  16. Free Computer Help says:

    Hi there
    I came across this site and because I was looking for an aussie SEO company. Your site really stands out with all this fantastic information!!!
    I like the way you actually follow through with real examples..

    September 3rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm

  17. Cody Joyce says:

    Hi, I’ve spent the last week on SEO for my new computer repair business and found that once google had re-spidered my new website.. i got a sale! and pretty much the top ranking for my targeted keywords.

    Ive been using many methods listed here, but it’s great to have a few more. Thanks

    September 9th, 2008 at 10:04 pm

  18. Deb says:

    Good post - forum signature is also a good way to get link

    Deb

    October 27th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

  19. Link Building says:

    I note you didn’t talk about linking between your own multiple sites - although this isn’t the best form of link building, it still has benefits as long as the sites are relevant to each other.

    Some say that hosting becomes important here though i.e. if all your sites have the same IP address and link to each other, then Google etc may discount the links somewhat.

    November 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

  20. Google SEO Guide says:

    [...] in our experience, a link building strategy built on multiple pillars forms up to 95% of a solid SEO strategy. You can learn more [...]

    November 16th, 2008 at 8:20 pm

  21. Link Building says:

    You have made an excellent effort to cover the wide spectrum to build links and move up the ranks , i guess you can add website reviews, forum signatures to the list .

    November 25th, 2008 at 5:19 am

  22. dejagib says:

    This is a good list to work with. I wish you had explained #10 some more.
    I think you left out 3-way linking, but maybe that is covered in #6.

    November 26th, 2008 at 9:38 am

  23. Anish Raj Malhotra says:

    Great..Thanks for sharing with us…

    November 28th, 2008 at 2:23 pm

  24. Sydney carpet cleaning says:

    It’s a really good list it helped me alot, thank you guys.

    December 30th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

  25. Vineet Rajput says:

    Thanks for sharing this great info, Surely link building is very effective method to get the traffic

    January 3rd, 2009 at 3:43 am

  26. Suresh says:

    You have made an excellent message, It’s a really good list it helped me alot,

    Thanks guyes

    January 11th, 2009 at 9:05 pm

  27. Mariana says:

    great! Thank you!

    January 19th, 2009 at 7:42 am

  28. Mike says:

    really informative article on link building strategies.. thanks for sharing.

    January 28th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

  29. seo grant says:

    Its a great article enumerating the best things you must do to optimize a site thank for the info…have a nice day

    March 25th, 2009 at 7:34 pm

  30. Shabu Anower says:

    I’d like to add one method:

    Open free account in Wordpress, blogspot and in others where you can publish article. Make sure that articles are unique and link your site by targeted keyword from those articles. You may consider adding your keyword in account name.

    April 29th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

  31. Ready Steady Print says:

    Another great post.

    Thanks again!

    May 8th, 2009 at 10:19 am

  32. Fish Tank Aquariums says:

    Is there a good strategy to get backlinks from video sites like YouTube and Google Video. Obviously they have high PR and would be great links.

    I know you can “advertise” your URL in the video, but I was wondering if you can get your URL hyperlinked in some way?

    Deon.

    May 11th, 2009 at 5:57 pm

  33. Webdesigner says:

    Very informative and very useful. It shows me, that I do it right…

    May 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

  34. Karen says:

    Please don’t give away all my link building secrets! :-) I’m not big into blog promotion so the tips above and very useful for a potential client! thanks!

    July 1st, 2009 at 10:31 am

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