[Houston Link Building] Basics
Local Search Engines and Directories
If your business is primarily local in Houston, or for that matter anywhere, the best place to start your link building campaign is with local search engines and directories. Because each back-link is considered a vote for your site, the more links the better for your overall SEO. In fact it’s been said that link building is the very fuel that makes SEO go.
Just don’t get all your links at the same time. Google loves natural links, so the first rule of link building is to build your links naturally over time.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Another good source for building links are social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Propeller, and Google Bookmarks. The new features on Delicious, namely real time filtering controls, playback for YouTube videos, Flickr images, and Yelp local info are awesome. Keep in mind that you can’t just bookmark your own content. Search engines are pretty smart so you should always be adding content other than your own to the social bookmarking sites. As you might imagine this can be an amazingly time consuming process. So this is where a web based tool like Social Marker comes in. Social Marker is a free service designed to reduce the time and effort necessary to socially bookmark a blog post, web page, or video. Where Social Marker goes astray, however, is that if you post to more than just a couple social bookmarking sites, search engines will easily be able to tell that your links are not natural.
Other excellent sources for back-links include:
Press Releases
Professionally written and distributed press releases usually result in the type of links that search engines seem to like most, namely, anchor text links. These are links that appear within the content, itself, and are made up of a key phrase that links to a web page originally written about that same phrase.
Articles
Articles written and distributed to the top article directories such as Ezine Articles, Amazines, and Go Articles also result in anchor text links.
Local Organizations
When you join your local Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commerce, you not only get a link back from each, but displaying their logos on your site will improve your credibility and trust at the same time.
Blog Commenting
When you leave a comment on a related blog within your niche, you’re allowed to include a link back to your website or blog.
Social Networking Sites
Among the best resources for quality back-links are the social networking sites. Linkedin, for example, allows you to include three anchor text links in your profile, while Twitter, of course, lets you add a link in your profile as well as in your updates.
One of the profile sites often overlooked is Google Profiles. Google Profiles suggestss already existing search results for your name that it already knows about. Even better, however, you can set up your own anchor text links. So Google Profiles is one site where your profile absolutely needs to be.
