All About Link Building

As we talked about before, there are two main parts of Search Engine Optimization. The first part is the website and we'll go over that in some other videos and how you can optimize your website but you want to make sure that your website is strong so that when Google visit your website, it knows what you're all about and what keyword you want to be found for. The other part is link building and that is what we're going to talk about here.

In this video today we're going to be talking all about link building. Here's what you'll learn today. We're going to talk about what link building is and show you some examples. We'll going to talk about why link building is important and why we're having this tutorial in the first place. We're going to talk about how to do link building and severals ways you can do that. Then we're going to talk about some important tips that you need to consider when doing link building.

Here's and example of a link. Real simple here, let's pretend this are two websites. This domain sportswebsite.com and Runningshoes.com probably exist out there but I just made them up. But if you look at the blue one, sports website, here it says for running shoes click here. That "click here" is a link. This is probably basic to you guys but just in case, I wanted to cover that. When you click on that link, let say, it takes you over to the orange website, the running shoes website. So what that does is it shows Google that the runningshoes.com website is relevant and trusted. That the blue websites says hey I trust this website this is a good site to go to. And so, the more and more links you have like that coming into your website , it shows Google that your website is more and more relevant and more and more trusted.

Next thing that we wanted to discuss here is the difference between being Indexed on Google and Ranked on Google. All you have to do is the first part of Search Engine Optimization, Optimizing your website to be indexed on Google and I'll show you an example of that. Here's a screen shot. I went to Google and I typed in running shoes and you'll see this number there are 16,800,000, that means that Google has indexed 16,800,000 websites that are about running shoes.So, being indexed about running shoes is not that big of a deal because there is almost 17,000,000 websites that have been indexed for that.

So, if you want to be on the front page of Google, you've got to be ranked on Google. Ranked on the front page. That's the difference. There are two factors in link building that we want to talk about. You want to have a lot of links. A high number of links and you want to have a high quality of links. Now the number of links that you need to build it varies depending on how competitive that keyword is or how much competition you have on the front of the screen of Google and how strong those websites are etc. There's tools that we can use and I'll go into that in a minute but there's tools that you can use to analyze your competition and see what you are up against. But in addition to the number of links, If you have links coming to your website from very very strong websites, those links are more powerful than weak links if you want to call them that.

Alright, here's some ways that we'll discuss in a little bit of detail here about how we can do link building. First of all, you can just talk to your friends, people that own business, own websites, maybe some business partners or clients and see if they'll put links on their website that will come to yours.Anybody that you talked to that you can get to put a link on their website coming to yours will be very very helpful.

The next one is blog posts, there's hundreds of thousands even millions of blogs out there. Find blogs that are interesting to you, Find blogs that relate to your business, relate to your website, read what they have to say and then make a comment on their blog. Just reply to it, let them know how you feel about it, provide some additional helpful information and usually when you do that, it will ask you what's your website. And it will allow you to build a link to
your website.

The next one here Web 2.0 sites. If you're not familiar with that term, it basically means a secondary website. You can have your website that your fully in control of, but you can also have website properties out there such as Youtube. You can have a Youtube page, you don't own Youtube but you can control your own page on Youtube or
Facebook page or your own blog. You could create a Squidoo links I mean, there are thousands of different Web 2.0 properties out there and you could use those to build links back to your website. For example, if you have a Facebook page, It's a smart thing to put a link on there that goes back to your website.

Now, Article Directories is a pretty good one. There's so much spam out there with article marketing that you want to make sure that you have a good written article that provides value, it provides good content and information that people are really going to want to read. I will show you one example of an Article directory, Ezine Articles is a great one. They're very strict in the articles that they approve that they allow on their website so you do want to make sure you write a good one, but it's free to post an article in Ezine Article and you could put links back to your website.

Online Business Directories. There are hundreds of these out there and you could put a profile you there about your business, operating hours, and all sorts of information about your business and most importantly, in this case, a link to your website.

Press Release. We all know what Press Releases are but you can do those, have a professional copyright or write a press release about your business, about your product, about anything about your website. And have them syndicate that to many places across the internet and that provides a valuable links to your website.

Here are some important tips about link building. The first one is Anchor Text, what anchor text is, let me go back to that first example that we talked about here about link building. If you look at the blue website, the sportswebsite.com, I added a second variation of that link. Instead of having the words click here as the anchor text.

The next one says click here for Running Shoes and Running Shoes is what you want to click on to go to the website. In this case, not only it tells Google that RunningShoes.com is a trusted website but it's saying that it's a trusted website for the phrase Running Shoes, that keyword. So that's important, as you do link building, make sure
you use your keywords as anchor text.

The next tip is the one way links are much better than two ways links. In the example of asking your friends if they'll put a link on their website that points to your website, in that case it's probably easiest to say, hey why don't we both put links to each other on our websites and it will be a sure link. That's better than nothing, but a one way link has a lot more value than a two way link so just keep that in mind.

Also, you want to spread your link building out over time. If you don't have any links to your website and all of a sudden in one week, you go out and build a whole ton of links, that's going to set a red flags and Google's going to wonder what's going on here, it doesn't look natural. So if you'll going to do a big link building campaign, so just want to make sure that it's spread out over time that looks natural. And because link building is a long process and we're not looking for quick results, what we're looking are long-term results, we wanna build links that lasts. One example I can give you set a link on your website on Twitter or something like that and while that might be a great link, and there's plenty of reasons why you want to use Twitter and stuff like that in link building, understand that a link like that might not last very long. It might have a strength through the first short while and then after the long term, the
value of that link goes away.

So, build links that lasts is the point I'm trying to make there.
We provide a free SEO consultation that we include two main things. The first thing that we can do is, you'll fill out a form that will answer some questions about your product and your service, what your focuses are and what you're hoping to accomplish for your website in terms of Search Engine Optimization. And so what we'll do, we'll start up by doing some keyword analysis. There's a lot of free tools out there and as we do this analysis, we typically record the screens we're doing and the free tools that we're using a lot are provided by Google and others and we'll show you what keywords have the most value for your business, which ones have the most search volume. If one keyword only gets searched five times per month but another one gets search five hundred times per month, you know which one we wanna rank for on Google. We'll show you all that and ways you can even do more keyword research of stuff.

The next thing that we'll look at is your competition. It's amazing what the internet technology what we can do nowadays. Its really easy and really quick to look at your competitors and see what keywords they rank for. We can see why Google is placing on the front page and so if you pick your keyword, we can see who your competitors are and how strong those websites are so we know what we are up against. Every keyword has a different level of competition. If you want to rank for running shoes, I know that's going to be a very very competitive one. We could look at those websites on the front page of Google for running shoes and know what we've go to do get there in terms of optimizing our website and in terms of link building.

We offer an hourly link building service. In this video, we taught you how to do link building and lots of ways of doing it but the key element behind that is the time. You really got to to a lot of link building for it to really impact your website especially on more and more competitive keywords and categories. So we're offering an hourly link building service. Our services starts out at a minimum campaign of 20 hours per month and we do that steadily, it will spread it out typically five hours per week roughly like that is where we start. And then we can go up from there if you want an 80 hour a month campaign or something like that.

We have a skilled team of link builders that will do link building and various message like we've been talking about here.I wanna give you one example of success. A good friend of mine opened up a dental office several months ago and he opened up his office in a city called Sandy. He said I wanna rank on the front page of Google for sandy dentist. And so we started out at our minimum campaign at 20 hours per month, we only had to do that for one month and we had him on the front page of Google for Sandy Dentist. Several months went by and he's happy with those results but he came to me and said, "Alright I want to be a little bit more aggressive now. I want to show up on the front page of Google for Utah Dentist." A bigger area and a lot of competition. So I did a little bit more research and determined that we could do that and we could do it for the 20 hours per month. Probably won't happen as quick. It will probably take between 3 and 6 months time horizon but we launched that campaign and after 3 1/2 months, he was up on the front page of Google. He's obviously very happy with that and he's already gotten some dental patients thru being on the front page of Google. You search for Utah Dentist and you'll find he's website right there.

What we talked about is What Link Building is and why it's important. You know how to do link building now you can jump right in and you also were shown some tips for link building. If you want to take the next step and have us help you out in launching your SEO campaign and link building campaign, go to our website at www.WebDesk.com/seoform. And what that will do is you can provide us some information about your website, about your keywords, about what you like to rank for on Google and then we can do some research for you and provide you that free SEO consultation and give you that research report and analysis on your competition.

I hope you find this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one.