Important stuff:
- Make sure you have a site worth linking to.
- Spend a few hours a week link building.
- Vary your anchor text. It looks more natural to search engines.
- If you do forums, don’t just throw links in to throw them in. Bring something of value to the table.
- Links within actual content on a page look the best in a search engines eyes. So keep that in mind.
Now, on to the good stuff….
OK, So you bought a domain, got hosting, created a beautiful site with all the on page optimizations required for a great SEO campaign….now what!? Well, that’s where link building 101 comes in. OK, So I am just going to dive in with a statement that applies to everything I am going to say after it:
YOU MUST BE CREATIVE TO GET QUALITY LINKS
Authority sites first, try to get quality links from sites that are an authority in your niche. For example, if you were selling Exotic Parrots- you would want to get links from sites that tell you EVERYTHING about Exotic Parrots and are a trusted resource for Exotic Parrot information. This part is going to depend on what niche you are in, obviously, but you get the point. I would like to make one thing clear- Wiki wiki wah wahhhhh…..Wikipedia is a good source but most of the links are no-followed so I would do some research before I drove down that street for links.
Networking sites (not to be confused with social networking like Facebook.com, MySpace.com, LinkedIn.com, etc). While these sites usually don’t carry that much link juice, they can help drive traffic to your site (which is your ultimate goal). So more traffic = more sales. If your not selling anything the same principals apply minus the money.
Comment on Blogs- well, the “no follow” tag kind of threw a wrench in this game BUT there is hope. If you are chasing after .edu� and .org links then get your blog on. A lot of blogs will allow you to post 1 or 2 links in a post before being marked as spam. Do a little digging and you should be able to get some links that are followed.
You can’t talk about blogs without throwing in it’s ugly cousin, FORUMS. These are a great source for links AND reputation. I think when you go after the fourms for just links, you are wasting your time. If you go into a forum and become a regular, then be as helpfull as possible without solicitation you will generally gain respect. After people realize that you know what you are talking about- slowing start throwing some links up and maybe change your signature to a live URL. The key to driving traffic over from the forums is to really know your stuff and be respected in that forum. Now I do have to add this warning- STAY RELEVANT. Don’t go to a forum about grave digger the monster truck and start talking about womens pregnancy issues. It’s not going to help your cause, stay in the niche forums for your market. It will be far more valuable.
Link baiting is next on the menu. Anything you can do to get people to link to you. If you are familiar with the term, viral marketing, then you know what I am talking about. In order to get some good link bait you have to be creative, maybe create a little widget or a game that people can play with on your site. If you build it and it’s good…they will link to it. So, just stay creative and you really have to find our own way to come up with good link baiting techniques.
Now lets throw article submissions and press releases into the mix, shall we? Well, good old fashion work makes this one possible. The reason I group these two aspects of link building into one is because I believe they are both very valuable to any serious SEO campaign. Submitting press releases online, not only helps to build links but it keeps your site in the news (ps- Google shows NEWS results in the SERP’s). Have you ever looked at the PR for CNN? Yeaaaa…..exactly….I am not saying green fairy dust (AKA Page Rank) is super important, but let’s just say Google has a crush on media sources like that. I would generally do a press release at least 1-2 times a month. Now, on to article submissions- it’s a debate between SEO professionals. Do the submissions help in rankings? Who knows? Overall, making 5-10 quality submissions a month CAN’T hurt you. At worst it might bring some extra eye balls to your website.
OK, Link Building 101: Part Two will be posted within a couple days…stay tuned.
Thanks folks!
