Link Building Basics - 5 Easy Tips
By: Chris Du Toit

Today building a website is so easy even a child could do it. There are even some online website builders available that allow anyone to create a website without buying software or learning to program in HTML. The difficult part however is to get targeted traffic to your newly created website.

Search engines are one of the best sources of targeted traffic, since they only deliver visitors who searched for what you have to offer. To get your share of the search engine traffic you will need to rank high on the first results page. To achieve this you will need to build links to your website, since search engines regard a link to your site as a "vote" of confidence, and thus give you higher rankings. The whole process is actually more complicated since each incoming link is also valued according to relevance and topic. This means a high number of links alone will not ensure a good ranking.

Here are some tips that will help you obtain more links and higher rankings:

1. Create content and distribute this to article directories.

The main idea is to produce original content that other website owners will like and publish on their own site. This means top quality content, not just a rewritten article. You include links to your site in the resource box and be sure to vary the anchor text (the text you use to link to you site). Since you will write about your area of expertise, the publishers using your content will also do so on topic related sites, and these links are great.

2. Submit a newsworthy press release

Make sure the content is not commercial in nature, and that it is relevant, interesting and newsworthy. In the last paragraph write a short description of yourself or your company and include a link to your website. Submit the press release to sites such as prweb, PR Leap, etc. and soon you will obtain some authoritative links back to your site.

3. Become a Yahoo! Answers expert

Although links from Yahoo! Answers will not really give you much of a boost in rankings, Yahoo! Answers pages tend to rank well and get a lot of traffic. Establish yourself as an expert by answering open questions and listing your website as the source.

4. Use Social Media sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages

Once again produce some quality content about your topic and create a couple of Squidoo lenses. It is easy to use and free to register an account. Squidoo is getting more strict about that content they will accept, so be sure the quality is top notch. It is also nice to find related YouTube videos to add them to your lenses. Include one or two links in the content back to your website.

5. Start your own blog

Register a new domain and start writing a blog. Keep the blog updated at least twice per week, and add links to your website in the content area of your posts. Use steps one to four above to build links to your blog too, since this will increase the value of your own links back to your main website.

This is not a short term strategy and it takes time and effort, but in the end search engine rankings will follow and you will get a decent amount of targeted traffic to your site.

Chris du Toit is the co-creator of a new product called Hardcore Article Marketing which puts your article marketing efforts on steriods. For more information visit http://hardcorearticlemarketing.com/

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