Guide to SEO and Link Building

Per Comscore Market Research Study, 60% of average website's traffic comes from search engines. Google organic search alone drove an average of 41% of all traffic to the websites in Comscore study. For most websites then, the single most important thing to do to increase traffic is to optimize for Google's organic search algorithms and create content that speaks to relevant search.

There are two main categories for optimizing your website for search engines: On-page and Off-Page. On-page optimization means:

• Creating valuable content on your website
• Ensure your content is rich with relevant keywords for your industry
• Building clear site structure, navigation, and sitemap
• Creating friendly url that is packed with your keywords
• Get a good domain name that contains your keywords

Off-page optimization means

• Getting inbound links from other relevant websites

Why Links Matter For SEO?

Links are a source of traffic.

The more inbound links you have to your website, the higher the chance your potential customers could discover your products or services.

Relevant inbound links improve your organic search engine rankings.

Search engine robots crawl the web to analyze the vast amount of websites' contents and prioritize the relevancy of each website. Building relevant inbound links to your website with relevant anchor text is the most important thing you can do to improve your organic search engine ranking.

Your Website's Content And Inbound Links

Both content and inbound links are important for your website to rank high in search engine. Google controls 70% of search market and one of the most important factors in Google's search algorithm is inbound link popularity. The important factors when building inbound links are:

• The number of inbound links to your website
• The quality of sites that link to your website
• The relevancy of sites that link to your website
• The anchor text (Anchor Text) of links to your website

Ways To Get Inbound Links To Your Website

There are multiple ways to get inbound links to your website depending on your budget. Many small webmasters or bloggers often do manual link exchanges with other relevant sites. This process takes a long time and efforts, and two-way links are not as favorable as one-way links.

Larger companies often hire SEO professionals to do the arduous tasks of link building.

An effective method to build inbound links is to buy text links ads on relevant websites.

Tips When Buying Links

• Buy links from relevant websites
  Our search functionality allows you search for keywords that exist in the publishers' websites.
• Use various anchor
  text that reflects your Top Keywords. e.g: "Home Insurance", "USA Home Insurance", "Buy Home Insurance"
• Buy links that point to an important page in your website
  e.g: You may want to link directly to the category page of your e-commerce website. If you sell electronics, then you may want to link directly to LCD TVs category ( http://www.mystore.com/lcd-television )
• Keep your links for at least three months to see results
• Search engines also classify websites based on their IP addresses. The more unique websites with different IP addresses linking to your website, the better.
• Track your results by looking at your web analytics (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc). Look at "organic" traffic referral.
• Use Yahoo's Site Explorer to track the number of inbound links to your site. You can do query such as: "link:http://www.mywebsite.com"

To sum up, inbound links are important factor for you to increase your traffic from search engines. The right content optimization and link building campaign can help make your website appear at the top of search engine's results for your keywords, and thus bring more customers to your website.