When looking to increase the number of visitors your website receives, constructing an effective link building strategy can be the first successful step towards an overall improvement in inbound traffic. A well planned link building campaign can also be a fantastic contribution when looking to increase your website’s ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo! As search engines are our first port of call when navigating towards new content, it’s critical that search engines recognize your website above others when users enter search queries that relate directly to your niche.

When search engine users are presented with pages of results, the likelihood of them scouring through pages to find your website listed on page 7 is very unlikely. This is why gaining as many links from popular websites within the same of a closely related niche gives your websites a lot of credibility when search engines value it.

Quality Content

A website that contains quality and unique information and content is much more likely to gain links from other sites. Construct a site they would be happy to associate with; a spammy website full of ads, popups and poorly written information will give any associate websites a bad reputation both to visitors who follow the link and to search engines crawling each website. Be confident that you are supplying something worthwhile, weather it is a product, service or general information. Webmasters who choose to link to your website may do so from other websites they run or may recommend your site to others.

Keep in mind, webmasters who choose to link to your site aren’t really gaining anything from doing so; they may want a reciprocal link to one of their websites. This reduces the significance of gaining their outbound link so if you have any other websites of less importance (from a link builder’s perspective) request to link to them from there instead.

The ‘Link Building Mentality’

Once you feel your websites contains enough relevant, quality content then you are ready to start outreach to other websites. Ensure you are sourcing a number of relevant websites, links from sites in the same niche would mean something to the search engines. Organize a list of potential contacts into a spreadsheet, you may want to source and contact a large number of relevant websites so organizing and tracking your online relationships is vital.

See if the sites detail their requirements for receiving a link from them. Would they be happy to just give you a link, or do they charge a fee for a link on their site? There are a large number of ways to gain links from relevant sites; the key is to be able to scan a website and identify something you can do for them. Identifying broken links and other errors on their site would be a great way of returning the favor, as would writing a quality, free piece of content and submitting it to their site free of charge.

Written By Daniel Travis – Brown on behalf of Blue Octopus Online Recruitment, follow him on Twitter @DanTravisBrown