Don’t Hire A Professional Link Building Service Without Reading This First

As a small business owner with a website I am always looking for ways to increase my exposure on the web. Link building is one of those important things I knew I should be focusing on but was unsure of when it comes to the best way to get it done effectively and affordably…till I learned the “how to’s” from Susanne Myers!  That’s why I am excited to be sharing a series of guest posts from Susanne this week on what she does best!  Please enjoy her input below and as always let me know if you have any questions!

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You Don’t Need A Professional Link Building Service – Really!

By Susanne Myers

If you own a website, chances are that at some point or another you will be approached by a professional link building service company about their services and while the offer might sound tempting at first, please don’t get too excited about it.

I have looked at quite a few of their offers both for my own sites and for those of my clients and I have seen some of the link building work they do. It mostly consists of creating fake profiles for various forums and other interactive sites. And while the forum profiles of active members do gain quite a bit of “link juice” and strength, a simple profile with one or no post on the forum, is often not even indexed by the search engines, making it completely useless.

What should you do then, if you obviously need links to get quality traffic and to start ranking for your keywords in the search engines? The good news is that SEO and link building isn’t nearly as complicated as some will have you believe and can easily be done in-house. If you are a solo entrepreneur just starting out, I recommend you do most of it yourself. Once your budget allows, outsource some of the parts and pieces. You can then simply create a overall link building strategy and hand your employees or virtual assistants a list of tasks to complete that will send your site traffic and build quality links.

Part One – The Strategy

Find a keyword you want to rank for and make sure you are using it in the title and once or twice throughout the content of the page on your own site. Pick a homepage or category page as well and have the keyword you want to rank for handy.

Step Two – The Links

Now that you have your two keywords, it’s time to start building links. Use the keywords as the anchor text in those links and whenever you can build a link first to the content page, and then to the category or home page. If you can include only one link, go with the content one.

How do you build those links? Here are a few suggestions:

• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Blog Commenting and Forum Participation
• Yahoo Answers
• Writing and Submitting Articles to Various Article Directories
• Guest Blogging on related blogs

Rotate through these activities and build as many links as it takes to rank for the keyword of your choice. Since it can take a little while for links to get picked up, I recommend you do 4 or 5 of the activities (mixing and matching as needed) and then wait a few days to see how the links affect ranking. While you are waiting, those quality links will start to bring some traffic to your site directly and will continue to do so day in and day out. Doesn’t that sound simple? Yet it is so effective and you truly don’t need a professional link building service.