Seven Essential Strategies for a Successful Link Building Campaign

Link building is hard work. And after optimizing your web pages for specific keywords, it's also the number one thing you can do to help your search engine rankings. So if you're serious about improving your search engine rankings, you will engage in a linking campaign.

I suggest that you use many different linking strategies in order to get links from lots of different types of web sites. The process can be very time consuming, but is essential. Use all seven of these strategies listed here and you will build a very strong catalog of links to your site.

1. Link swapping. This is a classic technique that still works. No, two way links are not as valuable as one way links. But this is a good way to get the process started, and you can still end up with some nice quality links. Regardless, you will help improve your search rankings.

2. Directories. Go ahead and pay for a directory submission service. Probably half of the submissions will be denied for any number of reasons, but you'll still end up with a bunch of directory links to your site. Any single link from a typical directory isn't worth much, but it's still a quick, cheap technique to get a bunch of links.

3. Articles. This is my personal favorite technique. Right now you are reading an article that I wrote and optimized to help the search engine rankings of one of the pages on my company's web site. At the same time, I am getting my name spread around by providing free information about the strategies that my company uses to promote our clients' sites.

4. Press releases. There is some expense involved with this strategy if you use PRWeb, which I recommend. PRWeb gives you the widest distribution of your press release and the most links as a result. Press releases also result in a nice short-term spike in traffic.

5. Social bookmarking sites. This strategy works very well if you post a lot of high quality, original content on your site. Publicly bookmarking your pages in a bunch of the most popular social bookmarking sites can give you some very nice exposure and, if people really love your content, many new fans.

6. Squidoo and other public content sites. Any site that allows you to post original content with keyword links back to your site can be a powerful tool. For example, Google loves Squidoo pages. If you own a well-produced Squidoo page with a popular keyword in its URL, you could find that page ranked very highly in Google even if your own web site is not. So a link from your Squidoo page to your main web site help your main site's rankings.

7. Blog comments. This strategy is not as effective as it used to be because blogs that allow links that search engine spiders can follow are becoming rare. But if you can find those blogs, a well-written (but concise) comment with a keyword link back to your site can be quite valuable.

Is it a lot of work to use all of these strategies? Absolutely. Is link building worth the effort? Definitely. Just remember to be very specific in your promotion. Do your keyword research first, and seek links that have your keywords in the link text.

There are tools that can automate certain parts of the above strategies. Experiment with some different tools and find ones you like that can increase your efficiency. Over time, you will get much faster, and your web site's link count will explode.