Now more than ever is the time to focus on link building with the Google toolbar PageRank update a month or so away the time to link build is now. Even if you consider PageRank to be a stupid figure on the top of your internet screen why not try and increase it for a bit of fun anyways. Think about it, all you need to do really to increase your PageRank is increase the amount of inbound and internal links you have to your website, the higher PageRank the better and the more they will help with increasing your PageRank. However inbound and internal links are not just useful for increasing your PageRank they do help in increasing your search ranking position, so why not use PageRank update as an excuse to increase your popularity and search engine position.
PageRank update usually occurs every 3 months, webmasters are constantly estimating when the next update will be and we have now been able to calculate that it usually occurs approximately every 3 months. So the next PageRank update should take place in July / August time however this could change I suppose it is up to Google when they update websites PageRank.
Internal Linking
Internal links can be created through a simple professional website design with an easy to use navigation system. Ensure that you link every page to each other this ensures that people can surf ever page on your website from any page they want to, it also maximises the amount of internal links that you can achieve through just the navigation system.
Another way of increasing the amount of internal links would be to link to another article if it is relevant to the article you are writing currently. For example this article is relevant to my article on SEO jargon so, in the first paragraph I will add a link to that article so people can read the definitions of the SEO words used in this article.
Another strategy which may work if you have a website with a large amount of articles is to create an archive for these articles; this not only increases the amount of internal links but also helps users find an article relevant to what they are searching for.
My last internal linking strategy would be to create and upload a sitemap for your website this will benefit both the user and the search engines. It allows your pages to be crawled and indexed faster and also adds more internal links to your website. You can find more about sitemaps here.
Building backlinks
If you consider PageRank to be an important factor for your website or you just feel that it is an excuse to build more links these next few methods will hopefully allow you to achieve your goals.
Quality written content
The first and most important link building strategy is to write quality content definitely a factor which I consider to be largely important to the success of a website. Through writing content which educates people, is informing easy to read and not plain boring your users will feel that reading is not a chore and more something that they enjoy they may bookmark your content or link to the article through a forum or another website. This will both increase your websites popularity and the overall traffic that you receive and will also increase the amount of backlinks your website receives.
Social Media Sites
This method works alongside quality written content and a basic rule would be the better written and more quality that is put in to your piece of content the more benefits you would receive through using social media sites to increase links to your website. By submitting your content to social media sites like Digg, redit and techmeme it attracts attention straight to your article providing targeted traffic to your website. If your content is well written, informative and people like the content then they may bookmark it or send the link to a friend or ten. Social media sites work in two ways, firstly they bring traffic to your website which is targeted your job is to attract the traffic through the title of the content, make it snappy, unique, eye catching but relevant to the content. After you have attracted the traffic you now need to make sure your content is well written, informative and fun to read. Focusing on these two key points both the title and content in the body will gain the respect of surfers who are looking for content in your niche.
Forum signatures
This is a great strategy to use especially if you are seen to be posting thoroughly on relevant forums on a daily basis. Firstly you will need to make sure the forum is “do follow” this ensures the website links in your signature are counted as a backlink, so for every post you make the links in your signature receive a backlink. This is great for building up backlinks and also helps to bring targeted traffic to your website.
Article Directories
Article submission has decreased in popularity in the last few years I would say through social media sites and the appearance of other websites and ease of submitting articles to these other forms of website. However they still act as a useful way to build links also they tend to be indexed fast giving you a higher chance of traffic coming in through search engines rather than self promotion.
In conclusion I feel the easiest and safest way to ensure that your website gets exposure is through writing quality content which includes all the ingredients to make a linkable article. Obviously this is easier said then done for a lot of people including myself who may not be an expert at writing. However I do believe with time brings practice and experience which will help you gain a larger knowledge in your market area which does help you write a more flowing article, not only this but I also believe that daily reading and writing helps to create a better higher quality article.
Here is the Google webmaster guide line these may help your website to get indexed and ranked as quickly as possible using Google’s suggested strategies.
