Increase Search Engine Rank with Link Building

When search engines look for pages to return for a query, they often come up with tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions of possible results. They have to have a way to rank those results so they can show you the "best" pages to answer your query.

One of the ways they rank pages is by the backlinks pointing to those pages from other sites and pages on the Web. Not just the number of backlinks, but other factors as well:

• Where the backlinks come from


• The authority, quality and popularity of the linking site


• The words used inside the link itself ("anchor text")


• Why the link exists

Search engines give backlinks more weight when they come from highly ranked sites, when the anchor text is related to the query, and when the link is given for "love" rather than for money or some other trade.

Look for sites related to yours who might be willing to give a link. One way of finding sites like this is to look at who links to your competitors. Maybe they will be willing to link to you too.

Create something worth linking to. No-one wants to link to garbage or spam, nor do they normally want to link to a sales page unless they are getting a cut. Make sure your content is useful, substantial, interesting, controversial, funny, amazing or otherwise worth looking at.

Link to them. If you blog, make a blog post commenting on their site and linking to it.

Ask for a link. Email them and politely ask for a link - not to benefit you, but to benefit them and their readers by providing extra information or a useful resource.

There are dozens of ways you can create links to your pages. Here are just 10:

1. Bookmark your page at social bookmarking sites.
2. Create a free blog and link to your site from your posts.
3. Create a free report or ebook and list it on free ebook directories
4. Write articles with links to your page and submit them to article directories
5. Create videos and list them on video sites with a link to your page
6. On forums where it's acceptable, use a link to your site in your signature file, which shows on all your posts
7. Comment on other blogs in your niche (in a useful, relevant and non-spammy way!) and link back to your site
8. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers or similar sites and link to your site as a resource. Make sure it really is a useful resource!
9. Make a page on a site like Squidoo or Hubpages and link back to your site.
10. Create useful software and upload it to free software directories.