It is a well-known fact that if you want to rank well on the search engines such as Google with your internet marketing strategy, you need quality links. Your website needs trusted and relevant links from a variety of sources before your website will rise in the organic search engine listings for the keywords you are targeting.

In other words, others needs to like your website first before it will be liked by the search engines. If you have a commercial website, a link building campaign might seem impossible to you. Your direct competitors will not be linking to you, and Google is trying to eliminate paid links.

Reciprocal linking is a thing of the past. Link directories are now almost worthless with the “Google Panda” update, so how do you get started with a link building campaign? This is a question often asked and the answer lies in the social media marketing trend happening online right now.

The sharing phenomena with social media

On social media channels, your content can be shared, and if enough people like what you have to say, it could go viral that results into thousands of views. Traffic generated from social media channels usually comprises of savvy online users.  These are the types of people who have their own blogs, and the ones looking for content that they are interested in. These are the users you want to appeal to.

If you create content that appeals to these users and it is easily share able, it can become popular on a couple of highly authoritative social media channels. This can get your website linked to from numerous websites and portals around the web beyond the original social media channel that it was shared on.

The easiest way that I have found to build links with social media is through blogging.  If other bloggers find your content interesting, they might link to you.  Popular blogging platforms such as WordPress is easy to set up and numerous sharing options are available that you can integrate on the content of your blog. Google also loves blogs because of the new and fresh content it can provide them.

Looking for results

Monitor and check your website analytics. Also, look for your highest value inbound links. This can give you an insight into how many links and traffic social media sources are bringing to your website. For future content you are going to publish, contact people who have already linked to you such as bloggers and let them know about your new content. If they are interested in your new content, maybe they will link to it again.