How to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking with Quality Link Building

Getting your website into the top ten positions of Search Engine Results Pages is no easy task. That’s if you don’t know how. This article will discuss the methods I use to keep my site in the top three positions for my chosen keyword phrase.

As most of us know, Google is the world’s biggest and most relevant search engine. The problem is that their algorithm changes on a daily basis, and they won’t tell us what those changes are. Even the engineers at Google are unaware of each individual change, and it’s quite a private affair.

So one day your website is at number one position, the next position ten, or even worse, fall into the sandbox. And once your site gets into the sandbox, I can tell you it’s a lot of hard work to get back into the first page of search results. Your site will be buried with thousands of other sites that nobody will ever find through the search engines. Not unless some drifter goes to page twenty of the results pages.

But fear not, there are some evergreen techniques you can use to maintain or achieve a high ranking. The first I will talk about is content relevancy. Google are big on this one. If you build a site using content generator software and plaster it with Adsense or affiliate program adverts, your site will be picked up as a spam site, and you will be blacklisted forever. Such black hat techniques don’t work these days, as the big G are no dozer’s and their complex algorithm will pick it up. Also, your site would be short lived anyway, and users will not stay around to read the jumbled garbage.

On the other hand, if your site is full of quality content, relevant to the keyword phrase of the user, your site has a better chance of staying in the top ten search engine positions. Therefore driving more targeted traffic to your site and you will make more sales. Visitors will hang around longer, and even refer friends from Facebook and the like. But the snag here is that you must update your site at least once or twice a week. The more pages you have, the more brownie points you earn with Google, and the more reputable your site becomes. Also, your site must not contain misleading or untrue information. Google have actually begun manually reviewing websites and banning those it feels will damage its reputation as the world’s biggest and best. And once your site is banned, it can take many months to get back in, and that’s not guaranteed either.

So the other traffic generating, ranking booster technique I will discuss is the art of link building. This involves visiting numerous high ranking sites and requesting a link back to your site. The more links back to your site, the higher up the search engine ranks you will climb.

Now before I go into how to do this the right way, let’s talk about software that automates this task. A couple of years ago I purchased a program that promised me to get four thousand backlinks within a week. I thought ‘hey – this sounds great’. So fair enough, it got me the links ok. My site was in the top ten results for a month, and then it was banned! It was all down to an algorithm changes that detected this software that automated the backlinks. Google likes backlinks that are made naturally, and it’s advised never to use software for this, it’s just not worth it.

Anyway, the first method I suggest for getting your first bunch of backlinks is to submit your site details to online directory websites. You’ll have to go to each site, register then submit your link. Now unless you pay for having your site advertised in these directories, it can take up to three months for your link to be submitted. So just do a search for ‘free website directory’.

The next form of link building I will talk about is social bookmarking. These are high ranking sites that allow people to recommend your site, place votes and in turn drive traffic back to your site. The top four social bookmark sites I use are Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Slashdot. I advise you only make three backlinks a day, as well as use a variety of titles, descriptions and link back to different pages on your site. This makes it look natural in the eyes of the search engine algorithms, and you remove the risk of having your site banned.

And lastly, the other link building strategy is getting links from Web 2.0 sites. This involves you posting original articles on the sites, with a resource box at the bottom. Now your backlink MUST contain the main keyword phrase of the page you are linking to, or it will be deemed invalid. The main Web 2.0 sites I use are Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and WordPress.

Also, you could pay someone else to create all your links, but I don’t advise this because some unscrupulous individuals are using spam software, and you risk losing your place in the search engines.

That sums up this discussion on gaining quality links to your site.