Eye on the competition

If you are just starting a website or have one that you have neglected in the way of building links, you may be wondering where to start.

There are lots of ways to gain backlinks to your site such as paid links, blog comments, directory’s, social bookmarks, forums, but you need to find the sites to start building your backlinks. This is where your competitors become your best friend. By researching your competitors backlinks you can gain hundreds, even thousands of linking possibilities. One nice clean way to do this is to go to Yahoo.com and search by site:http://www.your-competitors-name.com. As of this writing the results of the type of search you will see a tab for "pages" (their pages) and "inlinks" (links to their website). Inlinks will show you a pattern whether its directories, blogs, paid links or press releases. Now you have the information and information is power. Follow these sites back and investigate how you can get a link back to your website.

Make no mistake this takes time. You will find some sites that let you submit your website address for free and others have a fee. Submitting to blogs and forums or writing articles and press release will take even more time. Keep steady pressure on building links to your site and you will start to see results.

Forums Blogs and nofollow

Everyone says if you want to build back links to your website, you need to go to the forums and blogs and post comments. While this may be true and valuable, you really need to know about a little thing called "nofollow".

"Nofollow" is an HTML attribute value used more and more to instruct some search engines that a link should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results.

The problem is, if you are making legitimate posts, you are still loosing out by not receiving an indexed link back to your website. So before spending your valuable time on the blogs and forums, make sure your efforts are not lost with the nofollow attribute.

Links by sponsorship

Building links for B2B is tough. But if you want to be found on the search engines, it's something that has to be done. One way to accomplish this is find local organizations that are looking for sponsors. Many of these groups are hungry for donations, so for a potentially small fee/donation they will happily post a link to your website. Some do banners others will provide text links. Banners are nice for visual but text links will provide better results with the search engines.

One of my favorite organizations to sponsor is the Civil Air Patrol. However, there are thousands of options. Below are a few...

- local softball, hockey, etc etc teams.
- Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts
- Church groups
- EAA Chapters (Experimental Aircraft Association)
- Organization events (all of the above)

Sponsoring an organization like this does more that just build links to your website. Aside from doing a good thing with you money, these organizations often will promote your business while promoting their corporate sponsor program and word of mouth is great marketing.