Ok, you have a new site, great idea, the shelves are stocked, and the Now Open sign is flashing. Small problem – you have no visitors. Well now is your time to set the groundwork for link building for what is hopefully years to come. The first thing you need to do is get a few nice links pointed to your site. If you have friends with websites, beg them for a link to your site to help get you started. Maybe search LinkAdage and buy $50 / $100 per month of nice relevant links that you will keep long term. For these links, make sure the anchor text is something people should be able to search on and find your site.

The reason you need links right now is that you want your site indexed immediately by Google. Older websites tend to rank better, so the sooner Google finds your site the sooner your website age clock starts to tick (old is good with websites unlike people). Also, if the links you get are good you will eventually get some PageRank which will help you with getting more links in the future.

The second thing you want to do is start a blog on a completely different host then your main website. Your main website should also have a blog. This second blog site should be related to your main website’s topic. Also, get a few links pointing at this new blog that you create. IMPORTANT: Do not ever link your two sites together; it is very important that the search engines see your two sites as completely different websites. Keeping the sites separate will help you down the road.

Once your blogs are up and running, post at least 3 times per week in each blog. The better your blog posts, the better chance you will have of getting some steady followers and some free link backs to your blogs. Make sure your submit all of your posts to the social networks like Digg and Furl.

The main reason for this new blog site is to use it as a post swap site. It works like this; you offer to write a nice blog post about someone’s website if they write a post about your ‘main’ website. Of course both posts should include contextual links to each other’s website. If they have a really nice page, writing a post for a great link to your would be worth your time. This creates a 3 way blog post/ link exchange, which to the search engines, if done right, looks like one way posts.

Trading links direct, site to site is better than nothing, but the links tend to cancel each other out. Nothing beats a one way link.

It will take a while to get your blog to the point where it has PageRank and a following so think long term. After six months to a year, this new blog will become a link building machine for your main site. For the most part, the web is not a way to get rich quick, but if you are persistent and continue to learn and work on your sites you can certainly make a great living.

While you are blogging and waiting, constantly be looking for cheap one-way links to both of your sites. You need to add a few new links monthly to each site to show link growth. I recommend that you contact some relevant websites direct each month and offer to buy a link. You would be surprised at the good deals you can get on great links buy going direct to the webmaster.

Since you are just getting started, be aware the link building will take some money no matter how cheap and ‘do it yourself’ you go. If you are not prepared to spend at least $2,000 on link building over the next year, your site will have a tough time finding success. I am not saying you need to buy all your links, but even free links cost time and money. But buying a few solid links in the beginning this process will definitely speed your link building process.

Here is Link Building Part 2.