subject: The Most Useful Link Building Strategies [print this page] According to some research at least, somewhere around eighty percent of the entire volume of traffic is a direct result of organic search. Google commands such a market share of organic traffic that the vast majority of IM marketers optimize specifically for Google. However, to get your site a good search engine rank, it needs to have high quality backlinks. Regardless of where they exist, it is your links that will be the only clue to the search engines about the popularity of your site. Your PR (page rank) will be determined by its popularity as calculated by search engines, and the more inbound links you acquire the more traffic you'll receive - more popular. One important consideration is ideally your backlinks should have more quality attached to them versus quantity. You came for link building tips, and that's what we're going to offer you, right now.
Relevance is the key to high quality backlinks. There are many millions of sites that link to external sites of a totally different subject. The main purpose of every search engine is to give you highly accurate results when you search for something. Search engines tie that into links because they give more weight to a link that is from a relevant site. Sites that are not building links the right way are in fact penalized, so all the hard work goes into vain. So the more relevant links you get, the better you rank with the search engines.
If you want another good link building tactic, you should take advantage of social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is now a very large phenomenon, and these highly trafficked sites have many regular visitors who are eagerly looking for new bookmarks that appeal to them. Since these sites always have new, updated content, they are loved by the search engines. So you'll be getting a backlink from an authority site when you submit your link to a popular social bookmarking site. Another type of site that is very beneficial to get backlinks from are social voting sites, the best known being Digg and Reddit.
You also should not neglect another great way to get relevant backlinks, which is blogs that are related to your niche. You could ask the moderator if you could write a post for them, or just make a comment with your link. If you comment on blogs steadily, you will eventually have many links pointing at your site.
Link building, then, is an important task that you have to work at consistently before it starts to pay off. Don't be discouraged if you don't see immediate results. If you can stay focused on your goals, however, you will see your site's ranking improve.
