A Well Rounded Link Building Campaign Pays Off In The Long Run
One mistake many budding link builders make is that they are far too eager with their link building campaigns.
They read an article on a search engine discussion forum and suddenly think they know the golden answer to gaining a #1 ranking in the search engines.
This haste generally leads them to follow one single link building strategy. However it is far more wise to spend time on SEVERAL link building strategies.
Link Exchange Software Services
If you don’t want the hassle of link exchange software (with it’s bad reputation) or the worry of dealing with the unknown link exchange service professionals, there’s a happy medium you might be interested in.
Link exchange markets are basically link exchange software, do-it-yourself services.
The idea is that you signup on a website and start trading links with other like-minded webmasters.
It’s like a community of link builders, all in one site. You don’t have to worry about offending anyone – everybody else is there to build links too. You also don’t have to worry about over-priced professionals delivering unknown results – you get to do the work yourself.
But is it really work? There are plenty of link exchange software service websites out there. Some are free, and some you have to pay for. If you want to take the free route, you’ll still get the joy of swapping links with link-happy webmasters, but you’ll probably be putting in a lot of manual labour yourself.
Make Your Link Building Look Natural
One very important point to note before you begin building links, is to approach link building so that it looks ‘natural’ – in the eyes of the search engines at least.
This rule basically says not to add too many links too fast.
If you have a brand new website, it isn’t likely you’re going to get hundreds of inbound links in the first month. Yet this is what many over-eager webmasters tend to do.
The majority of websites out there (that don’t practice link building) will start off slow. Maybe a few links in the beginning before momentum starts to build.
It is also important to vary the anchor text in your reciprocal link requests. This is another way to make your link building look natural. Don’t go out and request 100 links with the same anchor text, because if those 100 sites had ‘naturally’ linked to you, it is EXTREMELY unlikely they would have all used the same wording in their links.
Link Building: Slow and Steady
Most people get frustrated with link building. They want to get onto the first page of Google straight away, and that’s it.
What most people don’t understand however, is that link building is a slow and steady process. Results don’t happen overnight, it will actually take months for you to rank well for highly competitive keywords, at least in Google.
But not all search engines will rank your site the same way. Some are easier to ‘manipulate’ with link building.
The Best Search Engines For Link Building: Google
So which search engines will embrace your link building efforts the fastest?
Let’s look at the main three search engines; Google.com, search.Yahoo.com, and search.MSN.com (now live.com).
Google.com
Google has the greatest market share in the search engine industry, by far. More people use Google to search for more keywords, more often.
This obviously has pros and cons. Firstly, if you can rank well for a competitive keyword on Google, you’re likely to get a near-flood of traffic. Having your site #1 on Google is more valuable than all of the most creative online advertising campaigns combined.
Firstly, search engine traffic is more valuable than advertised traffic. This is simply because if you somebody searches for a term on Google and sees your website, they’re already looking for what you offer. If they see your ad on a relevant website, they’re probably only partially interested in the topic.
By searching for the term, you know they are looking for exactly that, otherwise why would they search for it?
Secondly, search engine traffic is free. No explanation needed.
But getting highly ranked on Google isn’t so easy. It is generally considered to have the toughest ‘ranking algorithms’ that are notoriously difficult to ‘manipulate’ with link building.
Most websites will rank well in Google long after they’ve already started ranking well in MSN and Yahoo.
Next up: Yahoo.
The Best Search Engines For Link Building: Yahoo
search.Yahoo.com is the second biggest search engine, behind Google. Many webmasters, especially those that are very serious about link building and SEO, prefer Yahoo to Google for a few reasons.
For one, it is far easier to get to the top of than Google is. Most sites ranking #1 for competitive keywords on Google have been around for years. It’s a lot easier to get a newer site to #1 on Yahoo.
Yahoo is also generally more ‘receptive’ to link building efforts of webmasters. While Google has very strict standards that it’s search engine has to live up to, Yahoo is a little more lax. Basically, it’s easier to ‘manipulate’ Yahoo Search and get to #1 through link building than it is with Google.
Finally: MSN.
The Best Search Engines For Link Building: MSN
MSN Search (previously search.msn.com – now www.live.com) is both brilliant and terrible at the same time.
Brilliant because it has traditionally been extremely easy to rank well in using link building, but terrible because these high rankings often have little value considering how little traffic MSN Search actually gets.
MSN was the third major search engine on the scene, well after Google and Yahoo. It has a lot of catching up to do, and therefore it’s ‘spiders’ (the computer programs that scour the web looking for websites to put in the search engine) are over-eager to rank websites.
It’s a complicated process, but it basically means that you can use very simple link building techniques and still rank very well on MSN Search, and in a very short period of time.
So to summarise: Google – lots of traffic, but hard to rank well in; Yahoo – medium amount of traffic, not too hard to rank in; MSN – not much traffic, but easy to rank well in.