While I was still under employment with the dotbombs that forms a huge part of my career today, I was told that it was MY RESPONSIBILITY to understand and remember all the characteristics of ALL the search engines there were in cyberspace. I remember feeling like someone was holding a machete to my neck. Horrid, simply horrid.

But a punch was delivered and I rolled with it. During that time, some search engine marketing experts contended that placing links in all sorts of websites, including link farms, was an essential part to the game plan. Without which, you would NEVER get good rankings in ANY of the search engines.

So, there I was, two months after delivering my child, worrying about the sniffles my baby has developed and wondering if the search engines have changed their algorithm while I was worrying about my child’s sniffles. So, in I went to place all those links, one by achingly bothersome one, in all those websites. This was before people came up with programs that automated the process, so….yeah.

The search engines got smart and changed over the decade that I’ve been doing this so, merely exchanging links with people you don’t know or placing links to your website no longer work like magic - everyone’s using the same magical formula and something’s got to give.

During that time, I have a simple ‘I was surfing around and bumped into your website. I love it and would like to exchange links with you’ email template that I applied the cut-and-paste technique to. Today, THAT doesn’t work anymore either. I didn’t understand back then….but now, I do. Do you want to know how many of such emails that I get every single day? And do I bother to look at them? No, siree….I am better off writing articles like this to establish my position in my industry, thank you very much. Most of the emails come from webmasters who haven’t as much as glimpsed at your website (except for the contact page or wherever they found your email or contact form), anyway. Trust me, I KNOW this because I DID it.

Come to think of it, I DO reply some of the emails if they appear 50% genuine. But I tell them ‘You link me FIRST, then I link you’…and they never reply. See?

The secret is in making every single link that you post out there count for something….and this is just the way Google wants it…well, most of the other search engines see it that way as well….value of the link should be high….not just a random exchange of links. So, even if you post a comment (with link-back) in other forums, message boards, blogs, social networking site, etc….make it intelligent and put a value to it.

I know it’s bizarre but there’s no formula for finding the right authoritative websites and blogs that you can be ‘active’ in. But what you can do is to listen to what others have to say, read a lot and also listen to your heart (and head). The websites should NOT be your competitors but indirectly linked to your company’s products or services. For example, spa products and facial companies, air-conditioning systems and home/lifestyle or handbags and leather suppliers, etc

While asking (read: begging) for a link to your website used to be a breeze (an email away) back then, it’s much more complicated and very time consuming today. You have to spend a lot of time going through the website and send them an email that is COMPLETELY relevant to them….you may even need to spend some time helping, advising or communicating your feedback to the website owner in order to establish contact with them. Hey, this is the way it is now but once you have the link back to your website, congratulations! You have, not a link, but you have a VALUABLE link! And in the SEM world, that’s like becoming a Knight or conferred the title ‘Sir’.

For your information, people actually spend time counting sheep in the wee hours of the morning in their bed trying to work that one out.

Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance copywriter with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her blog for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef…and just about everything else under the sun.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marsha_Maung
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Link-and-Not-Link&id=2021173

Post from: Blogging For Noobs

Search engine is the largest traffic source for most websites. If you have created a new website, it is impossible for your website to obtain high search engine rankings. The reason is because you need to apply search engine optimization to your site so that it can rank high on search engines for selected keywords that you have targeted.

I know that it is always exciting for you to optimize your new site to achieve high search engine rankings as fast as possible. By ranking well on organic listings, you can enjoy lots of free and targeted search engine traffic to your site. You may be tempted to build back links aggressively in the hope of achieving good organic rankings quickly. However, this is not the right way to do it.

Search engine optimization requires you to build back links naturally and steadily. Link building is not a one-time project; it is an on-going process that you need to make it operational if you want to taste success with search engine optimization. And also, you should not build a large number of back links too quickly as this will seem unnatural to search engines and you will not achieve any favorable result by doing so.

So do not go about building hundreds of links in a single day. You may get high rankings initially but soon you will find that these rankings disappear very quickly too. This is because search engines will find out that you are trying to game their systems and will remove any ranking of your site from their organic listings.

What you should do is to build some links in the first couple of weeks. Write 3 articles and submit them to various article directories. If your articles are well written, they will be picked up by other webmasters and this will help build even more back links to your site. Also, you can submit your site to a few social book marking sites like Digg and Reddit.

Then for the next couple of weeks, you can participate in forum discussions. In forums, you can create a signature file where you can place a link back to your site. Every time when you post in a discussion thread, you will gain a back link if the forum allows search engines to index the posts.

One thing that you should not do is to buy links from websites. Search engines like Google will not take into account for any link that is purchased. So spending money on links just for the sake of link building is a complete waste of money. Instead, if you want to buy links, you should focus on sites that have the same target audience as you. Buy links from them to drive more targeted traffic to your site.

So the next time you are building links, you should always remember to build links naturally and gradually. Last but not least, link building is an on-going process. You must do it consistently if you want to achieve success in search engine optimization.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO services.

Find out more about OOm SEO services now.

Please feel free to republish this article on your website, or distribute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cheow_Yu_Yuan
http://EzineArticles.com/?Link-Building—How-to-Build-Links-Steadily-and-Naturally&id=2035272

Post from: Blogging For Noobs