There’s one thing every webmaster or website owner wants aside from website visitors: more visitors. And that makes sense, too, because the more people you have scanning the pages of your website, the higher the probability of you making a sale. Unfortunately, due to the competitive nature of the internet, getting all those visitors can be quite a challenge and may take months of SEO expertise to make it happen. But there is a short cut.

Link Building As An SEO Alternative?

Can link building really substitute top page ranks? It doesn’t matter from what angles you look at this, the simple answer is no. Well not completely anyway. But link building can be of good use to ensure that a steady stream of customers do come your way in the initial stages of your SEO campaign and it can also help you get closer to the top of the search engine results pages.

Consider John Steward, a freelance photographer from New Jersey who, due to popular demand, has put up a website containing his portfolio. Now as you, I and John knows, the already existing demand for the publication of his work on the internet may be a source of some future business, but to keep that ball on the move and to ensure that it keeps going into the right direction, John will have to let people know that he is in business.

Now search engine listing for a new website could take weeks, even months. As such people like John will have to rely on link building. This means visiting the websites and blogs of others within the same industry and making useful appropriate comments that contain a link back to his website. With enough interesting comments and contributions to other blogs, people will start looking at John’s website and, if the content is any good, link to his website. Their visitors will see the link to John’s website and follow it accordingly, etc.

While this might seem like a good technique, you’ll have to keep two things in mind:

John’s content is good enough to be linked to. John initially had to invest some time in the websites and blogs belonging to others before he got any results.

Now the above is not a status quo and doesn’t happen in every single situation, but it is a good example of exactly how link building can benefit your website initially. For those with established websites, take it as a lesson on how to improve those rankings and keep them getting better – Google thrives on quality links that come from same-industry websites.

At the very heart of search engine optimization and the ability to get relevant hits to your website is the concept of link building. Whenever a site links to yours without your site linking to it, your ranking with the search engines goes up. Besides just the search engine benefits, link building will also put your name in more places for people to come across. There are many ways to work with link building, and it is in your best interest to be aware of at least a few of them.

One method of link building that is becoming quite popular is the use of articles. For instance, if you run a costuming business, you can write informative articles about the history of costuming and include a link back to your website at the bottom of the article. There are many article databases out there now, and by submitting articles to them, you can do several things. This is a terrific method of advertisement because you are establishing yourself as an expert; when you give out good information free of charge, people tend to be more inclined to take a look at your product or services.

Putting your site up on various directories is another method of link building. There are many specific directories online where you can list yourself and a brief description of your services. People use these directories the same way they once used phone books, and by having your business in the right directory, you can make contact with many prospective customers. When people look in directories, they already have a good idea what they are looking for; you know that the traffic you get from a directory link will be relevant to what you are doing. Directories are an excellent place to work with link building, as well as offering you an opportunity to see what your competition is doing.

When you give a member of the media official information on your business or what you are doing, whether that person is a web journalist, radio personality, or news correspondent, it is called a press release. Press releases are also, if indirectly, related to link building. Although most of the attention you will get from a press release will be direct, you will also find that press releases get posted on websites and archived. This is a good way to reach people that might not necessarily frequent directories or article databases.

When you think about link building, it is helpful to think about it as a popularity contest of sorts. The basis of link building is to get as many people familiar with you as possible, and to make sure that the search engines are too!