The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here. The previous chapter, PPC vs Organic Traffic can be found here.

How do I build links to my website?

There are dozens of different ways to increase your link popularity. But what is the difference between building link popularity and getting links that actually send you traffic and makes you sales? That is the important distinction to make.

Every seo company will talk to you about link building and why link popularity is important. Obviously link popularity is one of the factors in determining how well your website ranks in the search engines, but are the search engines the only source of traffic you want?

Some link building should be done based on the fact that the website linking to you might send you some quality traffic that might buy your products and services. So there are two different types of link building strategies.

Link Building for Link Popularity

This is where you are working to get a lot of one-way inbound links to your website to improve your search engine listings. You can submit to web directories, get other related websites to link to you, build forum profiles, participate in forums and on blogs, do social bookmarking, and other methods to get these links.

Reciprocal Links

These are dead as far as helping your website rank better in the search engines, however, if you believe the visitors of another website would also be interested in clicking over to your website, then reciprocal links are still valuable. This is link building to increase the number of traffic sources for your website.

Buying Links

Again, almost dead for building link popularity for the search engines, but buying a link on a related website to attract their visitors to your website has value. It becomes another source of traffic to your website. Make sure the place that sells you the link uses a no follow tag to link to you so google doesn’t think you are trying to buy link popularity.

Buying Advertising

This is a buyer beware situation. There are a lot of websites that are real proud of the value of ads on their website. What I mean by that is many people overcharge for advertising.

Example: You have a real estate website and sell real estate in Georgia.

There is a web directory for real estate websites that is broken down by state.

They tell you that it will cost you $300 per month to be added to the Georgia real estate section.

Then they tell you they get 10,000 unique visitors every day and they have proof!

Wow! 10,000 people will see my listing? Nope.

Ask them how many unique visitors they get to the exact page your listing will appear on and ask for proof of that. Then ask them how many people click listing on that page daily.

Let’s say of the 10,000 people that visit that site, 200 actually get to the page with your listing on it. Of those 200, 20 actually click links. Now consider how many other georgia real estate websites are listed on that page. Let’s say there are 20 including yours. That means that likely this website listing will get you 1 click through to your website daily. Are you willing to pay $300 per month for 30 visitors? That’s $10 per visitor.

This was just an example of how you need to analyze the website you plan to buy advertising on before you spend the money. Negotiate once you analyze the data. If it doesn’t seem worth it, don’t buy it.

If you think the stats look good, put in a unique identifier on the link. Like; www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org

Everything after the ? mark will not affect where the link goes, but in your stats, when you look at pages visited, you can see how many people visited www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org vs how many visited www.yourwebsite.net.

Do not let it discourage you from advertising though. Advertising can help you build your brand on the web and can bring in some very good traffic to improve your sales. Just buy smart.