If optimizing a website is like giving your car a tune up, link building is like putting in a bigger engine. Simply put, there are going to be keywords that are out of your reach if all you do is on-page optimization, especially if your church is in a large city. Link building is needed to bring those keywords into your grasp. Links are like votes for your website. The more votes your website gets, the more important the search engines think your site is. That causes then to move you up in the search results for the keywords you are targeting and can get you ranking well for keywords for which you can’t currently rank well. So, what is link building and how do you do it? Read on my friend.

What is Link Building?

Simply put, link building is anything and everything you do to get people to link back to your site. You want someone to put a link on their site that leads to your site. These are known as inbound links. There are many strategies out there for how to link build, but in the end, the goal is the same: get as many links as possible from relevant sites.

What is the Best Link Building Strategy:

There are a lot of different strategies for link building. The reality is that there really isn’t a single, ultimate link building strategy. For some, one strategy will work better than others depending on your personality and the amount of time you put into the link building. Also, as time goes on, different strategies tend to trend as being more or less effective. Some strategies work well for a while and then general attitude of people starts to change and so your strategy has to change. You should also consider the other aspects of your church marketing plan church marketing plan and choose a link building strategy that works well with that church marketing plan.

My advice is to look around for different strategies and brainstorm for your own ideas and give them a shot. It’s best to use several different link building strategies as part of your search engine marketing plan. See which ones work best for you and which you enjoy (or at least don’t dread). After all, if you hate doing something, you’re not going put the time and effort you would need to in order to succeed. Go with what works and try new ideas as well. Remember, the Internet is always changing, so for the best results it good to keep trying new strategies. Social media (blogs, MySpace, YouTube, GodTube, etc.) are very popular right now, so be sure to consider ideas using the social media.

It’s Too Hard:

One of the biggest reasons that people don’t engage in a link campaign is that they think it will be too hard, or if they hire someone else to do it, it will be too expensive. As you will see in my next article (10 Link Building Strategies for Church Marketing), that’s not necessarily true. Yes, there are some strategies that are more difficult and can be very time consuming, but there are other strategies that are relatively simple or only have a short time commitment. Asking your members to link to the church site or offering something for free on your site are examples of strategies that don’t have to have an enormous time commitment. It may take a little time get the free information/tool on your site, but once it’s up, it takes very little maintenance. Registering with directories is a relatively simple strategy that can get you a lot of one-way links in a short period of time. It can take some time, but there are companies that offer good directory submission services that aren’t expensive. So, yes, it can be hard and time consuming to run an effective link building campaign, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of ways to get links relative easily, inexpensively, and without taking a lot of time.

In my next article I’ll give some ideas for link building strategies for church marketing.