If it's one thing that is extremely important and essential to Internet marketing, it's link building. Link building is perhaps most arguably, the most important aspect of running a successful online marketing campaign and/or business. So, how do you get started? There are many ways to engage in link building, but for longevity, you'll want to start out by building up a steady network of people that you can go to for what is called “link exchanges”.



A link exchange is when one person has a website that interests another person. The whole purpose of exchanging links is to gain exposure to a wider audience (usually one in your niche) as well as to increase your chances of major search engines like Google indexing your page so that others will see it show up higher in the rankings. For example, when you search for a specific term like “car industry” in Google, you may see several results on the first page of results. No doubt that the companies listed on that first page have a voracious link building campaign going on. At the heart of it all, link exchanges are about gaining more exposure for your website in an effort to draw more attention , which should (hypothetically) draw more traffic, which should yield some sort of profit if the people you attract wind up being interested in what product or service you have to offer.

Link building isn't that easy though. There is something known as do-follow and no-follow blogs. As a general rule, you always want to try to find blogs that will allow do-follow comments. Blog commenting is an important part of link building. Blog commenting is simply when you visit someone's blog, read what they have to say in a particular blog post and then post a response to it. Typically (if the person is nice), they will allow you a place to leave your name, email address and a place for a URL linking back to your website. If they are really nice, they'll allow you to include your web URL within the actual body of text that you write on their site. Again, the whole point here is to gain exposure for your blog. When you are leaving a blog comment, you want to try to leave a comment in which you took a little time to read the post so that you have something pertinent to say in your response. The last thing blog owners want to read is a comment by someone that either a) doesn't make sense or b) is just a sales pitch for that person's site. If this happens, you may find yourself very quickly banned from a particular site or labeled as a spammer.

If you own a website (which is different from a blog), many web sites will dedicate a specific page within their sitemap to doing link exchanges. However, while this is fine and is the common thing to do, most people want to become involved in link exchanges where they can have their link placed on a page that gets a lot of traffic or has a high PR rating (such as a PR rating of 5 and above). Link building is also a great way to build relationships with other bloggers and business people within your niche. You can learn a lot from this sort of networking while you help to improve the ratings on your site!