Online Marketing 7 - Link Building

The most important thing for your website is to get it noticed by the search engines. So you certainly won't hurt your cause by submitting your new site to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most of the smaller search engines take their info from one of those big three, so that will help anyway.

Then there's YouTube and the other video sites like Vimeo and Google Video, which we'll look at another time. YouTube, by the way, is now the second most popular 'search engine' after Google, at least in the UK...

But submitting your site doesn't guarantee that Google will even index it (add it to its list of billions of sites), let alone give it a good ranking and a high position in the search results.

So you need another strategy to make the Google spiders find your site, and that's linking from sites that Google already visits. The more popular and dynamic a site, the more often Google will visit it. That equates pretty closely to the site's PageRank and that gives increased value to any relevant links from that site.

So, build your links from sites that Google already likes and visits often. You can see when a spider last visited a site by clicking on the 'cached' link for that site in the search results. The more recent that cache is, the more often Google probably visits.

But just linking once, even to a very popular and active site isn't enough. Google has now publicly stated that recent links count far more tan older ones. Indeed, very old links are pretty much ignored. Which means you need to keep adding new links and renewing or replacing old ones to show them that your site is highly sought-after and that people are still keen to link to it (even though it's you who actually adds the links).

On that subject, it's likely that links added within the content of another site - ie, by the site owner - will one day count for more than those added by visitors or users, but I haven't seen Google say that yet. It probably isn't easy to discriminate between 'owner added' and 'user added' links but I wouldn't put anything beyond the geeks at Google!

So, it's probably going to be worth actually talking to website owners and negotiating an embedded link, but for now, keep building your links from any relevant site you can.

There is software available to automate much of the link-building process and we'll look at that in the near future. Meanwhile, try to add a few backlinks each week, as a minimum.

Roy