A well designed link building campaign can rank your site high with the search engines, and also increase traffic to your website. When you link to quality sites, you will build your brand and receive a lot of exposure, with webmasters wanting to link to your site.

Back links or incoming links are links at other sites that lead to your site. They are one of the most vital components in the search engine optimization process. This is because search engines assess the importance of your website based on the quality of back links coming into your site. Link popularity tells you how many websites are linking to yours and you can check this with a free tool.

If there are a large number of links from related or complementary sites that already have a high search engine ranking, coming in to your website, then your website will also automatically rank high with the search engines.

To develop an effective linking strategy, the following will play an important role:

• The quality of your links
• The anchor text in these links
• The total number of links
• The quality of content on the page that has these links
• The number of outbound links on the page
• The page rank of the page your link is on

Search engines smile upon natural incoming links to your website. But how do you build incoming links naturally? How to make webmasters want to link to your site? There are sites that will offer to link to yours if you link to theirs, but this does not always work. Instead you need to focus on getting productive one-way links, since the idea here is to make the search engines happy. Here’s how you can add ‘link value’ to your site:

• Get related sites to link to you because your site offers value to their traffic. This is hard work but when you accomplish it, you can enjoy unprecedented traffic, better conversion rates and therefore, profits.
• Offer value to the website that can link to you by offering complementary products or services or useful information that the site can link to.
• Add special reports or guides to your website so that you can address a specific need.
• Publish articles, hints and tips based on what customers want. This material must be link worthy to your target market so that they want to link to you.

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A lot of affiliate marketers tend to spend on pay per click advertising without realizing the necessity of the landing page. In fact, some even use their website’s home page as a landing page. While this could work in some instances, it is always better to create one that is separate from the home page. Why? A landing page must be regarded as the most crucial page since this is where visitors convert to customers or subscribers and this is what your visitors will see first when they click your link. That’s two excellent reasons why a landing page is worth spending time on.

Here is a list of practical tips that you can put into action immediately. Read on.

• As mentioned earlier, do not use your home page as your landing page because too many choices and links distract your visitors. They end up going through your site, which is good, but you will not achieve your goal of getting them to take that specific action which will turn them into customers or opt in subscribers to email list, ezine or newsletter. So make a separate landing page that is focused on your goal.
• Optimize your landing page after you build it with the keywords that were responsible for bringing your visitors here. This will give you the optimum conversion rates. While a high search engine ranking is great, even more important is converting your visitors to customers. So your landing page must be planned in such a way that when your visitor arrives on it, they see the words that brought them there and buy, sign up, opt in, etc.
• What you write on your landing page must be understood without ambiguity by your visitors. There must be no doubt as to what you expect from them. Don’t say too much. Succinctly convey your message with bulleted points. Use keywords in the title and subtitle. Preferably let your landing page have an 800 x 600 resolution so that anyone can view them clearly.
• Be specific. Use words that call your visitors to action. The content must flow naturally so that they go ahead and do what you expect them to do. Action words like “Buy Now” or “sign up now” “give me my free trial” etc. must be prominent. Always keep it simple to understand.
• Never put long sales letters on your landing page. Your visitors clicked your link because they are ready to buy and not read miles of text. The landing page must only contain information essential to close the sale. Of course, there’s always the chance that you’ll have visitors who would like to buy but need information. For these visitors you can always have a link to a resource page, which opens in a new window preferably.

Thus, the landing page must make it easy for your visitors who are eager to buy to just place their orders. Going deeper into your website, you can learn how to optimize your website images for search. Read the image optimization post here. 

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