Copywriting and Link-Building Tactics for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for succeeding in the bustling and competitive online industry. By spending time on optimising your site effectively for the search engines, you can help yourself achieve good quality organic traffic whilst keeping up with your competitors.

One of the most important areas of SEO is inbound links. Effectively, the more relevant and high quality sites linking to you, the better. There are countless ways to help build links, but there are a few tried and tested methods that tend to work well in the majority of situations. The most established of these is reciprocal linking in its various guises include three way or `triangular` linking involving a link from site A to site B with a link back to site C and so forth. You must approach trading links with caution and adhere to best practice. In essence, the idea is thus that you simply trade links with other webmasters. It is worth noting however, that these links must be of a decent quality. Be certain that you trade links with websites that are focused on the same topic or theme to you, and that you get a good link position (preferably within the text of an article or with appropriate keywords within the link text). Approach webmasters individually, and steer away from "link farms" or other similar offerings. Quality is more important that quantity when concerning reciprocal linking.

Another very common way of getting inbound links to your site is by posting information on other websites. For instance, many webmasters promote their products or services by answering relevant questions on Yahoo! Answers. By providing an answer and referencing their website for further information, they can create a good quality, in context link to their site. This helps to boost your search engine ranking, but also creates more traffic as the Yahoo! Answer pages are indexed in Google. The same principle can apply within forums, whereby you can subtly include your link within signatures and relevant posts. Be sure to tread carefully though, online users hate nothing more than a spammer – so make sure that whatever you say is relevant and do not blatantly crowbar your website into discussions. Also, be aware that many blogs and forums use the nofollow tag, originally conceived by Google as a mechanism by which webmasters can signal that they do not want the link to confer ranking to the linked-to site and that it is there merely as a convenience for users and not for any other purpose. Whilst not all search engines respect this tag, Google certainly does and links with this tag will not confer `link juice` or link equity is it is more correctly known to your site.

Good copy writing is also very central to SEO and link building, remember, "Content is King". People are far more likely to link to your site if you provide good quality content. Provide staggeringly good content and it may be regarded as `link bait`, with others linking to it because it is just so good! If you are struggling to create content to attract links, then try writing a "Top 10 Tips" list for your chosen niche or a "25 ways to..." This format tends to attract more links than you would expect from a standard article, and can help to build a reputation for your website. If you have written such an article, you could also submit it to article directories in order to gain more exposure (and of course more links as well).

In all cases, you need to recognise that the search engines are sensitive to grammar, spelling and even the semantics (meaning) of a piece in the context of your site's theme. Low rent offshore content simply will not do the job. Content needs to be produced to the highest standard you can afford or achieve.

SEO can be an incredibly complicated area, but with enough work can reap huge rewards. If you are an affiliate, it may be worth focusing on more targeted SEO affiliate marketing, to give relevance your campaign.