| Link building campaigns are essential to the health of any business's website. Making sure that you have enough inbound links to your web content is crucial, because these are indicators to the search engines that your site is worth ranking highly. The first step in getting links to your site is to create good content. Even if you follow all of the other steps that will can help get your site out there in front of potential backlinks, you will get much better results if your site provides information that people are willing to link to.
There are many ways that you can organize your link building campaigns. One of the first steps to get you started is to submit your website or blog to the major search engines which are AOLSearch, AllTheWeb, Ask, Bing, Google, LookSmart, Lycos, and Yahoo. First check on each one of these to make sure your site isn't already listed. If it is not, submit your site to the most relevant category. Some of these sites are paid and some are free. If you do not have a budget, submit your site only to the free ones until you have enough that you can invest in one or more of the paid sites.
Next, you will go to the minor search engines. There are 26 of these to date: A9,About, Accoona, Alexa, AltaVista, Answers, AvivaDirectory, Dmoz, Excite, Gigablast, Gimpsy, GoGuides, Jayde, JoeAnt, LinkCentre, MozDex, MyGreenCorner, NetQuantum, Netscape, Qango, SearchMonster, Skaffe, TowerSearch, UmdumWebDirectory, WoWDirectory, and iWon.
Then you will want to go into some Niche Search Engines and Directories that are specialized to your target market. Just go into your search engine and do a search for directories and search engines in your market. You may be surprised at how many come up!
Now you'll go into an area that many overlook. That is the area of search engines that cater to a particular geographical area. If your product or service is geared towards a worldwide audience, you can, of course, skip this step, but it's a great way to get ahead in a local region. Take a look at the following link to get some ideas: http://www.searchenginewiki.com/CategorySearchEnginesRegional
Remember when you are submitting your sites, and creating the descriptions for them that you don't want to be overly promotional. You can also avoid repeating the name of your website or blog within the description (contrary to keyword optimization intuition). The simple reason for this is that many directories will not accept your site if you violate these conditions.
After you've submitted your site or blog everywhere that you wanted to, wait a couple of months and then check to see if it is listed. Many will have you listed in that time, and others will take quite a while. Also keep in mind that certain directories may reject your site without notifying you in any way. Don't let this discourage your link building campaigns. Focus on the positive results. |