One of the most important factors, of the many considered by search engines in calculating your search ranking, is how well your website or blog is linked to other sites. Almost nothing you can do to improve your ratings will have as dramatic an effect as increasing the number of these links.
There are several simple and inexpensive ways to improve the number and quality of the sites linking to you. By concentrating on this one metric, you can have an amazing impact on how well your site does in a search for a particular keyword.
The simplest thing you can do to improve this link count is to start visiting other blogs and websites that have to do with the keyword you care about. By visiting these sites, you have the chance to comment on posts and leave a link back to your site. These all add up over time to help improve your link count.
You could also start your own blog, or even a group of blogs related to keywords you care about and link these back to your site as well.
Be sure to add appropriate links on these blogs to your site to help build additional links to specific areas of your main site. This will encourage visits by people that read your blog and you may get additional links from them as well.
Submitting your site to website directories is another good idea for helping to boost your link count. These directories will naturally link to your site and can help direct traffic your way as well as raise your sites ranking. The thing to remember with site directories is to submit to a few each week and not to do them all at the same time. Some search engines will punish your ranking if you suddenly appear in a lot of directories at once.
Also, the ranking of the directories you submit to can impact your ranking as the search engines give more credence to sites with a higher ranking and will raise your ranking accordingly.
Writing articles that your publish on your blog, or on your website is another great way to build additional links. You could submit these articles to other blogs for additional exposure as well. Each of the articles you write should have both your name, the name of your website, and a hard link back to your site.
Most blogs that accept submissions will publish them with this information intact and help you build even more links back to your site.
A recent phenomenon is the availability of sites with good search engine rankings that are willing to sell you links on their site back to your site. These sites will give you an immediate and dramatic boost in your rankings for a keyword based on the link they provide back to you as a trusted site, it’s like they are vouching for you. Be cautious with this as some search engines are aware of this and will punish you if you use it too often.
Another thing a lot of good webmasters do to help raise the ranking of their sites is to visit and participate in some social networking sites on the web. These sites allow you to submit content from your site and comment on posts or articles they publish and also allow you to post your name and a link back to your site. This helps them with traffic, and helps you with another source of links and traffic.
The final approach you can take is to find other websites and blogs that center on your main keyword or topic and see if you can trade links with them. This is a fairly common practice and really helps raise the ranking of both sites involved in the trade. You might be surprised to find how accommodating a lot of the folks that run these sites can be. Most of them are more than willing to trade links with you and may even be willing to trade content as well.
Applying these techniques to your sites will certainly help their rankings with the search engines. The number and quality of the links back to your site by others is a very important factor in determining your search engine ranking. By spending a little time and effort, you can improve it dramatically.
Warmly
Shenthil Ranie
@trafficdiva
