by John Eberhard
As I have discussed in past articles, Google considers the number of links coming to your site from other sites, called “inbound links,” to be the most important criteria in ranking your site for any given keyword. So the job then became, if you wanted to be able to rank well on Google, link building.
If the site that links to you is highly ranked itself, that gives you more “link juice” than one that is not highly ranked.
Search engine marketing professionals used to do this by writing to owners of other sites and asking them to link to the site they were trying to get to rank well. Often the search engine marketer would promise to link back to the other site as well, so the whole activity became known as reciprocal linking. This practice has been dying out as Google has given decreasing value to reciprocal links, until word was they finally took away ALL value from them in May 2008.
In my past articles I have listed out many actions that you can do to build links to your site:
- Putting up a blog and linking to your main site in the sidebars and in the body of your articles
- Submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs
- Putting up a separate blog for press releases, and also submitting the releases to online PR sites
- Putting up content on social media sites
- Social bookmarking
In this article I’m going to list several specific sites where you can put up content that will link back to your site, that I know rank well and will show up high in search engines, thus giving you better link juice.
- HotFrog.com: This is a business listing site. You can open up a free account there and list your site, and it ranks really well. Right now this comes up as the #1 site when I check for links to my own site.
- A Corporate Page on Facebook: Put up a corporate page for your business on Facebook, and this will also rank really well on search engines. First open up a personal account on Facebook and then add a listing under “Pages.” I recommend the book “Facebook for Dummies” which gives insight into how to use Facebook to best advantage for marketing and not do dumb things that are considered not OK and that will piss off other users. You can see my Facebook corporate page here.
- PR.com: This is an online PR site where you can open an account and submit press releases about your company. They won’t accept everything you submit but ones that get in rank highly.
- GoArticles.com: This is one of the top article directory sites. Open an account and submit articles which include a bio box at the bottom with links to your site.
- AboutUs.org: This is another business directory that is set up as a Wiki, meaning anyone can go up there and add comments. But if you open a free account and put up a listing for your business, it will rank very well.
Adding content to all the above sites will give you inbound links to your site, coming from high ranking sites.
