SEO: Search Engine Optimization/Optimisation (moving your website up the search engine rankings).

Link Building and Link Baiting are a very important parts of search engine optimisation campaign.  To understand why, you need to understand how Google - and other search engines - work out their results.

Imagine for a minute that you’re Google and someone has just searched for “baby blankets”.  Now, a quick check of Google shows me that there are about 181,000 results for “baby blankets” on Google UK.  So, how does Google know which of these 181,000 sites are the most relevant and important?  It looks at a range of factors, including the relevant of a website’s content (does it feature the term “baby blankets” regularly?  is it in page titles, link text .. ?).

OK, so it’s checked for the key phrase appearing in content and it’s found lots of sites that are all about baby blankets, so how does it decide which of those to show first?  One of the major factors to check is the popularity of that website - that is, how many other websites link to it.  These are called ‘incoming links’ and you should think of them like recommendations - it’s just like someone saying to their visitors that your website is well worth reading.  As with all recommendations (online and offline!), the value of a recommendation is determined by the importance and reliability of the recommendating source.   A link from BBC News to your site would be a better value link than it would be coming from a site that nobody’s heard of that doesn’t get a lot of visitors.  A link to your “baby blankets” site from a parenting community website would be more relevant than a link from a Star Trek convention website.  You need to make sure that your incoming links are from good quality, relevant sources.

There are a few ways to get good quality incoming links and the most obvious way is simply to write GOOD CONTENT!  If you write something worth reading, other website owners will link to you - because they genuinely would like to recommend your website.  This is known as link baiting.  Another popular method of “link baiting” is to write relevant articles and submit them to article directories.  You include a ‘bio’ part in your article that links back to your website, which is kept in place by any webmasters who re-use your article.  The end result of potentially hundreds or even thousands of links back to your site - all from writing one article!

• I can write an article on your behalf and submit to article directories and announcment lists.  We’ll agree on the title and subject of your article before it is written and you’ll have final sign-off before it is submitted to any directories.  The charge for this service is £25 to write the article which includes planning time, my research of the subject area and the writing of the article.  If you would also like me to distribute the article for you, I charge an extra £15 for that service.
  ARTICLE WRITING ONLY - £25:
  Your website address:
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  ARTICLE WRITING & DISTRIBUTION - £40:
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Another way is to build links manually, by contacting the owners of a range of relevant, quality websites and directories and asking them to link to you.  Sometimes they’ll ask for a reciprocal link (and you’ll find link exchanges are easier than one-sided links to your site), so you should think about how you can fit that into your website.

Link building is not technically complicated, but it’s time consuming and it’s a long-term project.  You need to find your sources, contact each owner and wait for a response - and, you need to build your links slowly (search engines can penalise you if they think you’re ’spamming’ with link swaps in order to artificially boost your ranking).  You need to keep a good record of who you’ve contacted and when, so you can send a reminder if necessary and make sure you don’t contact the same person twice.

• If you’d rather not have to worry about managing your link building project, I offer this service for £100 per month for 20 new quality links to your site each month.  There is no fixed contract, so you can choose not to continue after the first month. You can book the service using the button below and I’ll get in touch after I’ve received payment to get your requirements.
  
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