I understand why link building is so crucial; it gives Google an idea of how important a page is with regards to the number, quality and context of links that are linking to a the site.
However I still find it a bit of a dark art; why would people want to link to you? how do you keep it ongoing? Reciprocal vs one-way links?
In order to demystify it, here are some key points;
1. have the right ratio of qualitative vs quantitative links. You do need a lot of links, but err on the side of fewer links from sites with some sort of authority (Google pagerank of 6 and 1,000 inlinks). Ideally these should be within your industry; so if it’s a cooking site don’t link from a car site.
2. Wikipedia is great. If you can link to your site from Wikipedia/write an article about your industry- do so. Google gives Wikipedia a lot of clout (the second click phenomena)
3. Good anchor text– ideally someone should link to your site and the text next to the link (underlined) should say “cooking tips” (or whatever you want to optimize for), rather than saying e.g. click here. This gives Google some context about what the site is about if the link has a description.
4. don’t limit yourself; put relevant links back from blogs, forums, video sites, anywhere where there is a “follow” on the link (which means that Google will give it credence)
5. PR is a great way to get more links. News sites are usually authority sites, if you can get a well optimized release on to a news site it will help.
6. Link bait is an interesting opportunity. Do a zany stunt to get people interested and linking to you. once the newspapers start linking to you, sit bank and watch your pagerank rise.
7. Be persistent. Get a couple of interns in, and get them to get a spreadsheet going with prospects. This involves going through the sites that link to sites that are optimized for the keywords that you want to optimize for. put them all on a list and send them a personalized e-mail. be persistent with unanswered mails and buy your interns lunch every now and again. This is a fairly monotonous task.
8. Don’t buy links- it’ll cost you and it isn’t a sustainable strategy
9. The best way is to have good content that people want to link to. Sort of a no-brainer, but this is the quickest, most effective and guaranteed return method of getting links.
These are some tips to improve your links (concentrate on the bottom one and you’ll go far). Get busy.
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Brendan McNulty 