Killer Link Building Techniques and Strategies
After you have set up your own website, you need make it rank higher in the SERPs for your targeted search terms. For this the most important off page optimization technique is link building. In the recent past, off page factors have become more important than on page optimization and the most important off page factor is supposed to be link building. So you have to carefully craft your link building techniques and get more votes for you.
In simple terms link building or link popularity is how many reputed website point to you and vouch for your credentials. Technically speaking link building is the number and quality of one way backlinks that you have from authority websites.
But gone are those days when you could exchange links with other websites and could get your page rank higher in the SERPs. Search engines like google, yahoo now follow a more complex algorithms and can easily fathom this out.
Rather search engines now want one-way links from websites of your own niche to link to you. Here two terms are important. First is ‘one-way’. This means that there is a link from site A to your website but you done have a link on your website which points to site A. Second is ‘of your own niche’. This means that if you are dealing in a website for freelancers then you don’t want backlinks from the graphic design community. Rather you should aim at getting links from those website who are also dealing in freelancing.
Link building – exercise extreme caution!
So you have decided to start link building for your website. Exercise extreme caution. There are several Black Hat link building techniques around which will get you quick results and lots of links at once. Well rest assured that these tricks will be found out by the search engines in no time and you shall be duly penalized for it. Search engines don’t care about your techniques of link building but they can find out your intention. If they find out that you have a bad intentions and are taking shortcuts then you shall be easily caught and black listed.
Now that we are done with the analysis of the term link building, we shall now look at the strategies and techniques that are employed in link building.
Submission to articles website as a link building strategy
If you can write good an informative content then you can use this gift of yours as a link building tool. There are many high PR article submission websites like www.ezinearticles.com who allow ‘experts’ to submit articles in their website. These websites get lots of hits every day and are valued highly by search engines. So if you are dealing in graphic design and put up a good article with them which has links back to your website, you shall gain in two ways. One, you shall get a lot of referred traffic and two you shall get high quality relevant backlink which will help your search engine rankings. While writing articles for these websites remember not to write a plain and simple marketing pitch to sell your products. Article websites will not approve such articles. Write an informative and useful piece of articles that audiences of your niche would love to read.
Sometimes narrating some kind of informative personal experience with a software or a service works wonders. Emotional articles, short animation snippets which tells a story, a cartoon or humor also draws attention.
But beware, there are many article submission websites who are not valued at all by google. So be sure to check the authority of the website you are submitting to. Select a high PR website and you shall be safe.
For example take a look at this article : http://ezinearticles.com/?10-Killer-Logo-Design-Tips-For-Designers&id=3240350
I wrote this article for my graphic design crowdsourcing website www.shopfordesigns.com
Directory Submission as a link building technique
There are millions of web directories all over the internet. Many of them are free and some are paid. There is no point going for a link building spree on each and every directory you find on the internet as you surf along. Search engines will find this out in no time and will not give you any credit for this. Rather try to post on some highly valued directories like www.DMOZ.org or if you are keen to go for paid once start with Yahoo Directory. These websites are valued as authority directories and you shall get your due credit for it.
There are many SEO companies who will give you about 1000 directory submission for say $99. Do not fall prey to such campaigns as it will do you little good.
Some on page link building techniques
Make sure that all your pages are visible to search engines or in other words all your links should be crawlable. If you are using text links or image links then your images should have appropriate alt texts with the keywords of your choice. But while doing this make sure you do not use the same keyword again and again. Doing so will make search engines think that you are spamming keywords and will rank you down. Never do anything that appear spammy to search engine bots. Another thing that is often not discussed yet is very important is spelling and grammar. Run proper spell check in your website and write grammatically correct articles in your website. This has indirect effect on building the authority and reputation of your website.
Link building through discussion forums and newsgroups
If you can join a discussion group for forum that is in your niche then do it. Follow all the threads of discussion and make regular postings. Remember to post relevant links to your website while doing those postings. In this way you can increase one way high quality relevant links to your website. Newsgroups can also be used similarly for one way link building. You can add a signature which bears your link to all your posts also.
Link building using free hosting service and sweepstakes site
These are very little known tricks. There are lots of hosting providers on the internet that provide free hosting space. If you put up small websites in your nice in those hosting spaces and then include links from there to your own main website then you get lot of relevant one way backlinks for free.
It is also a good idea to run some kind of contest or giveaways periodically and then ask the directories that list contests and sweepstakes to list your website url with a link to the contest page. In this way too you can get free backlinks. Even when the contest is over these directories generally put those links in their archives so those become permanent backlinks.
Press Release submission as a powerful link building technique
If you offer a service or a product or pure information through your website then you can submit press releases on a myriad websites which accept good press releases with your links embedded. Most of these sites are indexed regularly by the search engines so you can not only get backlinks from these sites but people can know about your products, services or some new informative article that you might have composed.
News reporters, bloggers and the press regularly scan these PR websites and if they like your article they may give you some free publicity. So submitting a good press release goes a long way in your link building strategy.
Link building strategy by comment posting on blogs
Make a habit of reading blogs related to your niche and make comments on the posts. Remember to make meaningful and well thought comments or else your comments will not be approved by the moderators of the respective blogs.
Use your anchor texts in the name field instead of putting your name but make it a point to use a variation of your main anchor text so that spam filter softwares like SPamKarma do not flag your posts as spam. This will lead to removal of all your comments from all the blogs that use the software.
Some argue that blogs use the attribute ‘no follow’ with comment links. Well my advice would be not to bother about it. Firstly because people who read the blog also tend to read good comments and they do not care about no follow link attribute. Secondly, search engines like Ask.com and Yahoo Site Explorer still count ‘no follow’ links.
Let us do a simple calculation. Say you post 3 comments a day. After about a month you shall have a 100 odd links back to your website. After a few months time you shall be yourself amazed by the number of backlinks you will be having to your website. You shall definitely reap the benefits!
Analyze link building strategies of your competitions and learn from them
One of the best ways to formulate link building strategy is by watching others who ranks amongst the top for your target keywords. There are various tools found on the internet that will tell you where your competitors are putting their link building efforts. This will help you understand their link building strategies and techniques. I personally use a very efficient tool called : LinkDiagnosis. You can find it at : http://www.linkdiagnosis.com
Link Diagnosis just makes you type in the domain name you want to analyse. It runs a test and finds out where the site is putting its link building efforts. It figures out the anchor texts for the said links, the page rank information of the link page and also finds the number of outgoing links on that page. All these helps to calculate a metric called link strength. This metric is also calculated automatically by the website and a clean and formatted report is presented to you. If you register then you can also save these reports for future analysis. You can download the reports as CSV if you want.
Also check out which authority websites are linking to your closest competitors. You could ask those websites to link to you too. By all probabilities they will be interested if pitched well.
Link building effort in a page with many outbound links
Link building by the way of blog posting and placing links on ‘resource’ or ‘useful links’ pages is to be evaluated. If a blog posting has a page rank of say 5 but it has 75 comments posted on it with links in them then its of little help to place your link in such a post. Rather you should concentrate of placing a link in a PR3 page with 10 outgoing links.
This is because with every link posted the link strength of the page is reduced. Some are of the opinion that even inbound links affect the page strength but its not so much as the outbound links do. So while doing link building try to find pages that has less number of links.
Link building secrets – what many won’t tell you!
The best practices of efficient link building strategy is by analyzing your competitions. Analyze their links and keep an hour every day to submit about 10 links to pages with good authority. You shall find that after an year your website has become an authority on your niche and the number of visits has grown tenfold if not more.
Concentrate in the quality of content in your website. If you are providing a service then make sure you are the best in your field. In this way you shall make offline link building for yourself. People will talk about you and believe me this ‘word of mouth’ works wonders. You will notice that your site is being bookmarked by more and more people every day and you shall have a steady flow of direct traffic apart from the search engine pie.
Make people come to your website by dint of your content or service and make them stay and browse more pages. In this way you soon won’t have to think about search engines anymore.
Link building strategies – the donts
First and foremost never participate in link farms which attempts to increase link popularity. This is considered Black Hat SEO technique and should be avoided by all means.
Never try to get links from websites that are not reputed. This will do more harm than good. If you get a few links from porn sites or cracked software sites then you might stand the chance of loosing the reputation you have and can get blacklisted. Remember that links from sites of a totally different niche will not do you any good.
Be cautious with your outbound links. Make it a point not to link to low integrity websites.
Never ask for a link from a website that has its link paged seated deep in its directory structure. Search engines do not crawl deeper than two levels of directory structure so you can be sure that those backlinks will not do you any good with your rankings.
Also do periodic reviews of your backlinks to ascertain that your backlinks don’t point to a page of your website that does not exist. This is fatal. Remove such links or augment them if possible.
Last but not the least
You can send out birthday, anniversary and Christmas gifts to good bloggers.
Create a hype about some kind of service you are offering or some kind of breakthrough article you might have composed.
Even if its out of the way you might blog about something important which happened recently like the death of a pop star or a massive earthquake somewhere. You might just write about them as a news feature. Search terms with recent events are always high and search engines will definitely place you higher for this.
You could offer free screensaver, wallpaper or a plugin or a software for free from your website. If it’s useful people will link back to your website.
Put your website link in your linkedIn profile. LinkedIn still allows do follow links.
Following the above tips and techniques will get you good result. Happy link building endeavour!
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