SEO Basics: Submissions and Basic Link Building

As my SEO Basics: Understanding PageRank post explains, links are very important. Basic link building for new websites that have little history is simple. Article submission, RSS feeds, Directory Submission, and viral link building tactics are standard practice. Although there are various unscrupulous ways to build links, as time goes on, Google will eventually crack down on what you are doing so stick with the proper ways to build links.

Directories

The most sought out directory to get a listing from is DMOZ. Unfortunately, it takes several months to get listed by them if they accept you but if you are accepted, it provides huge benefits. There are also many paid listings that provide listings, the best of which is Yahoo Directory. However, the price for these paid listings is quite a large sum so you should check if the amount required to get listed is within your budget. Most of the smaller directories are less stable and disappear frequently so I shall refrain from listing them here. Directories are the easiest way to get links but their benefits are usually smaller unless you get listed by one of the better directories.

Article Submission

Article Submission involves submitting your articles to websites such as Ezinearticles.com where they will be given to other webmasters to post up on their own websites with the author’s signature which should include your URL. By giving out free articles, other people will promote your site for you.

RSS Feeds

By adding a blog to your site or syndicating your articles, you can provide services such as Feedburner and other blog syndicating sites content with which they can take and place on their own website. Although your blog posts will dissappear from their site eventually, in a fashion similar to article marketing, people could take your posts and provide a link back or if they’re just there to read interesting articles, they could just become another visitor.

Viral Link Building Tactics

Viral Link Building tactics are basically ways of bringing a high amount of traffic with one small part of your site as a whole by creating potentially popular items and marketing the specific item instead of your site. One popular way is providing a service to a popular website in your field such as one blog design website giving a popular blogger a free custom template and then asking them to blog about you. Another way is to create a visible video on Youtube or article that is provocative and produces a lot of heated discussion. Another thing is images. If you create a very popular mascot or image that is attractive to may people, they will come to your site to see the source of the image in an attempt to perhaps find a wallpaper or something. The side effects of having a popular video, image or article written about you by an authoratative source is a large amount of traffic. A real life example is the Leeroy Jenkins video on Youtube that popularized the gamer’s clan website and made them known to the gaming community.

Consistent Content

This seems like a no-brainer but posting consistent content will boost your traffic in the long run. A great example is Glossarist.com that recieved boosts from increasingly larger websites up to USA Today when its relative importance skyrocketed and now has a PageRank of 6 (For a time it had a PageRank of 7 or 8).

Other

There are many other link building tactics which I’ll address in later articles. The ones listed here are basic and should be implemented by most types of new websites looking for more traffic.