Link Building
As a webmaster myself I am constantly looking for ways that can improve my site. The main way this can be achieved is by building links.
Of course we should never forget that content is king. The way I interpret this is due to my own experiences. I had a very strong site that Google loved but the visitors got put off by the appearance - I spent too long worrying about links and I neglected the most important thing - the content. Without good content you will not make it in the world of the internet. Your visitors are the single most important thing and if you do not please them, you have no hope.
Link building is the next most important factor though. Google loves links and the more high quality inbound links you have pointing to your site, the higher in the search results it will appear. Of course, the positioning within the search engines can mean the difference between a bankrupt business or an extremely profitable business.
This has created a problem, certainly for me. To get quality inbound links is not too hard if you have good content that people will naturally want to link to, however, to get this content noticed in the first place is very hard as you have no inbound links, you do not appear in the search results (or if you do, many pages away). so you have to ge the ball rolling yourself.
Google does not mind you building links yourself but what it is now clamping down very hard on, is paid links. Paid links are there to make richer people feature higher in the search engines. This would be unfair as Google wants to return the most relevant content to its searchers and to return only relevant results from only people with money would be extremely unfair.
Google is clamping down on this very hard now so link sellers beware - you face a ban or penalty for selling links. Even link buyers now need to watch their backs.
So what options are there now to build links, but keep within the search engines policies?
Free Directoies
This is an option - free directories pop up every day. You can add a link easily and choose the anchor text you desire. The problem here is the links carry very little value. Not only this, but many people assume running a directory will be easy and bring in good revenue - unfortunately this is not the case and generally most free directories will disappear after a year. Having said that I still believe that directory submission can work as long as you make it part of your weekly, if not daily routine to submit to a few of these. This really is links in numbers.
Article Marketing
This is where you write an article and submit it to some article directories with a couple of links to your site in the resource box. People are allowed to use your article on their site as long as they show the links. This could mean that a well written article could appear on many peoples sites providing a great relevant link back to your site. The problem here is that Google is now clamping down on duplicate content. With multiple copies of your article out there, many of the links could well be devalued. I continue to write articles as I quite enjoy it but how much SEO value it carries now, or for the future, I do not know.
Link Exchange
This is now frowned upon by Google and is against their policies. Having said that, if you do link to a relevant site to yours, that is useful to your visitors and that site links back to you then it can provide decent traffic to your site. It’s a good way to get started if you have quality content but no inbound links. Linking to, and having links from irrelevant content will get you nowhere IMO.
Social Networking
This is where you can vote and allow others to vote for an article or story on your site. Each vote counts for a link back to your site and often brings in some traffic also. Again this is good to start off your site but only really applicable if you are writing your own unique content.
Blog Commenting
Find a blog, similar to this one, in the same context as your website, leave a comment and ensure you include a link to your site - do not spam here, most poor comments will be removed. try and add something to community and in return you will get a link back to your site and possibly some more traffic. Most blogs are nofollow so the link iteself does not carry weight in Google - but traffic wise can still be worthwhile. There are tools out there to check if links are nofollow but more and more blogs these days are becoming dofollow to encourage commenters.
In my opinion, it seems a lot easier for blogs and bloggers to succeed at the moment, Everything is against the online stores that have to have duplicate content in the form of product descriptions, do not have stories to submit to social networking sites, cannot exchange links, buy links or potentially not even write articles. It would seem Blog commenting really is the only way forward now.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Building backlinks is probably the most difficult task and all of the above go towards the SEO mix. Google, Yahoo and MSN are now rewarding sites that have links from high authority sites and video is a common feature in the SERP’s now.
If you can master a little skill producing video content, a decent powerpoint presentation is good enough, then you can see much quicker results with researched keywords.
A great resource is tubemogul.com where you can distribute/track them for no cost.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I have a small annotation for the last paragraph, blog commenting:
There is a good search engine for do-follow blogs at http://www.seo-traffic-guide.de, and another good way is to do a google search for “this sites uses KeywordLuv” as you can even use you desired keywords in comments then…
Mike
August 26th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Link building via blog commenting is my favourite technique. Although time consuming, it provides the best results in my experience. It shouldn’t be forgotten that, whatever your niche, blogs are excellent for research, learning and networking, … the reason for the blog in the first place!
August 29th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Totally agree with the un-fair link selling and buying on part of web masters. Owners with deep pockets are doing it. Even buying $500 .edu links. services like tnx and 3-ways must be stopped and banned by google….but how is it possible to identify by google, if a link is sold or solely added for visitor’s help purpose. Since you even can buy only related links!
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Thanks for the post. This is a topic which at least every SEO consultant and Agency have elaborated enough about. Link building should be natural, but that doesn’t mean purely so. When I first started optimising my site, I learnt the essence and importance of content & links- both internal and external, this is my strategy for improving my search performance and traffic. Having worked in a virtual office environment, it becomes very difficult to cultivate links unnaturally.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:57 am
The back-links are a tedious process but very effective in my experience. As possible, avoid giving a spam message on articles - with or without back-links, the blogger deserves respect in his/her article.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Backlinks are hard to build. In my experience article marketing is the best, but you can get a lot out of commenting on blogs that dofollow.
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