Just like traditional offline stores, creating relationships within their niche market is important. The same is true for an online venture. You can build your online business with link building to increase credibility and sales.
Links are simply sites pointing back to your website. This is an important step in marketing online because the search engines place a lot of weight on links. These are not just any links, but the ones that mean something should be related to your niche and have some credibility of their own. The biggest question is how does one get links?
It may seem impossible when just starting out to link to established sites. There are a few different ways to build links and you can start by contacting the webmasters and asking them to exchange links with you. This may seem like a daring move, and some will give you a flat out no way, but it is okay; you just move on to the next site until you have a few yeses.
Linking to established sites helps your rankings in two ways. One, when the major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Bing crawl your web pages and see that bigger well established sites thought your website was good enough to link to you will get brownie points for those links. Remember, these must be relevant to your niche market or they do not count for much of anything.
The second way to approach link building is by participating in forums and blogs. When you join forums most sites will let you add your website or blog URL. When you become active and start building relationships with members, you can direct them to your website. Many will do so without asking just out of curiosity. If your web pages are interested, most will link to you. It is important to remember that you want to provide useful information and not just, “Hey take a look at my site.” Providing tips on the forum topics, directing members to useful web pages, and basically showing them that you are genuine will help with building links.
Another way to get links are through link building services. There are several free services where you can add your URL to the database of other users and visitors will review your website and rate you. Many of these individuals are looking to exchange links and are quick to send link requests to sites they think will benefit them. The more sites you review the more your URL will be displayed. Be careful when considering who to exchange links with; it must be relevant to your web pages.
Regardless of how you build links, the important thing is to get started. It may seem like linking to the competition is not a good idea, especially if you are just beginning, but if your business offers better deals, better service, and an overall great experience potential customers will come back to buy from you after checking out the competition.
