SEO for Beginners Continued

If you haven't already read my previous SEO for Beginners blogs, you may want to read these first.

Introduction

SEO for Beginners (Part I) explained the importance of keyword research (or keyword discovery).  Selecting the right keywords you will optimize your site for is an absolutely critical first step.

SEO for Beginners Continued (Part II) described how to successfully integrate these keywords throughout your site in a way that would appease the search engines (especially Google), without frustrating your viewers.

So now that you've carefully selected your keywords and strategically sprinkled them throughout your site, it's time to move on to the most important step in SEO: Link Building.

Yes, I'm sure there are a lot of readers who consider themselves SEO experts saying, "Wait, but what about this...? or What about that...?"  (I'm just kidding, I doubt there will be more than a few readers).

There are additional steps in onsite (on-site) optimization (what you do to your site), but all of them can wait.  Right now the most important thing to do is begin building links.  Building links from other sites to yours is what we call offsite (off-site) optimization.

Link Building

The following sentence will summarize this third and critical step, so please read it carefully.  You must find relevant and high ranking sites who will provide a dofollow link to your site using different variations of your keywords in and around the anchor text.  Lets break this down, shall we:

a. Find relevant sites - you want these links to be on sites that are related to your content and niche.

b. Find high ranking sites - you want your links to be on sites that are doing well in the SERPS and/or have high PR (Page Rank).

c. Dofollow links - many links on the net are nofollow, which means they will not help you much.  You want links without the nofollow attribute.

d.  Anchor text - this is the text that the visitor clicks on to take him/her to your site.  You want your keywords to be in and around (if possible) this anchor text.

e. Different variations - you don't want to keep using the exact same anchor text or text around your anchor text.  Remember, the search engines are looking for signs that something isn't natural or organic.  Keep changing it up a bit.

Where to get these Links?

a. Submit your site to related directories and topsites (also maybe a few high quality general directories)

b. Post blogs and write on forums related to your site (include a keyword rich link back to your site)

c. Write articles and submit these to all the top articles sites (include a link or links back to your site)

d. Provide a free product or service in exchange for a link (kind of like what Boonex does)

e. Email webmasters with sites in same niche and request a one-way link. (Good luck with this one)

f. Email webmasters with sites in same niche and request a link exchange. (Reciprocal links do help)

f. Consider the option of hiring an SEO company, a link building service, or buy your own links.

Now these are just a few ways you can build links back to your site.  There are other ways which I will mention in my next blog entry.  However, these are the main ones.

Now because I don't want to overwhelm you right now with too much information, I will end this blog entry here.  However, I will be happy to respond to individual questions about link building.

One final word: Keep track of your links, at least until they become too many to keep counting.  And if you exchange links with another site, make sure the sneaky bugger doesn't remove your link while you maintain his/hers.  There are a lot of crooked webmasters on the net, so be careful.