Even with the advent of Google’s new “+1” social media ranking system coming into play link building will remain an important topic when it comes to search engine rankings for your product or service. Being a tech writer at the essay writing service DoMyWriting, I can say that link building is one of the least understood topics in SEO. Google tends to not even count many of the links that SEO marketers believe will help their sites’ rankings! Hence, it is important to understand the best link building strategies.
Knowing this, you must understand what kind of links Google gives weight to and why. You need to know and apply the most current and the best link building strategies and practices listed below. And, as you build links to your site you need to ALWAYS keep these best strategies and practices in mind.
Table of Contents
The Three Most Important Factors in Link Building
1. A One-way Highway
You want to try and get as many one-way links as possible. This shows Google that other sites are linking to you because they want to. Google does not give as much credibility to reciprocal links as they do to one-way links. A one-way link is a positive vote for your site and your content. A reciprocal link is neutral and carries very little weight.
2. Authority Counts
Authority counts are an important part of great link building strategies. In fact, a one-way link from a “high authority” site is worth more than 1000 links from brand new sites. Google used to gauge authority according to the page rank of a given site, lending more power to a site with a higher page rank. That is just not the case anymore. With Google’s most recent changes high page rank is only one of the things that are taken into account. The days of building links via high page rank social media sites are not over, but they bring far less “link juice” than they once did.
3. Relevant and Related
This should be common sense, but Google gives more weight to related sites that link to you than they do unrelated links. The name of the game with Google when it comes to SEO is RELEVANCE. If you own a dog training website, and you have thousands of links from sites all over the Internet that have nothing to do with dogs in any way at all, Google will see this as suspicious and discount those links completely. It appears that in many cases, Google will simply ignore them.
To sum up this first section, the best link to your site that you can get would be a one-way link, from a high authority website that is highly relevant and directly related to your site. These three factors are the most important factors for determining link quality.
Now that you know the best link building strategies and the best type of link you want to focus on getting to your site, let’s look at all of the different ways this can be accomplished.
Link Sources
There are many different places you can get links from that match the criteria for a good link already mentioned in this article. Just as you want to get as many different quality one-way links to your site as you can, you also want those links to come from a variety of different sources.
Let’s look at a few of them…
1. Contextual Links
Google loves these types of links. A contextual link is a link that appears in the actual content of someone’s website. Since it is included within the content of a website, such as an article, Google can immediately deem the article relevant to your content or not, and determine its relevance.
2. Static Links
These are also viewed highly by Google and are very similar to contextual links. Many large authority sites will have a page where they link to sites with similar or relevant and helpful content. This can be a simple contextual link or even just a URL.
3. Blog Comments
This method has waned a bit in the past couple of years due to automated tools that produce blog comment spam, but it can still be a helpful tool to boost your rankings. Making comments on other blogs about their content, with a link back to your page that has related content, is given some credibility by Google.
4. Forum postings
Finding forums where people who would be interested in the content of your site can be a goldmine. In many forums, you are allowed to take part in conversations and include a signature file, which can contain a link back to your site. If the forum is highly relevant to your niche and you truly use the forum as it is intended to be used, you will get some traction in the search engines from this. It is also a great way to get some extra sales right away, seeing as how you are engaging directly with people in your target market.
Mixing up your link sources is one of the best link building strategies. In addition, your site will appear to have gained these links more naturally, and Google likes that. Use as many sources as possible. As long as the sources are related to the content on your website you will do well.
Now that we know what kind of link to get, and the different sources to utilize, we need to look at how you are going to present the link, and what you are going to link to on your website.
Anchor Text and Deep Linking
Most website owners tend to link to a homepage. This means that when you receive natural one-way links from other websites in your niche the other sites will generally link to your main site address. This is fine and you cannot control that. When you are building your links to your site though, you are going to want to link to other pages on your site.
By linking to different pages of content on your site you will have many more opportunities to present your content to the search engines and have highly relevant sub-pages included in the search results. Many times these sub-pages get indexed under long-tail keywords that have very few other sites listed under them. Your main domain (homepage) will also gain a higher ranking when more of your sub-pages are being represented. If you focus on getting backlinks to as many sub-pages of your site as possible (deep linking) the long-term benefits in the search engines will be tremendous and long-lasting.
The next thing you have to consider is your anchor text. You want to make sure that your anchor text is highly relevant to the sub-page you are linking to. Google places some emphasis on this when deciding on the relevance of your pages.
Final Words
Put some careful thought into what term or phrase you are going to hyperlink from. For example, the overall theme of your website might be about home business, but an individual page you are linking to is about blogging for home business. Make sure your anchor text is as specific as possible. Also, you must make sure that it is highly relevant to the specific content on that specific page.
If you follow these link building strategies and practices you cannot go wrong, in my opinion. Your sites will stick and remain in the search results for years to come.
About the author:
Diane H. Wong used to be a business coach. Besides, she is a writer at DoMyWriting so she prefers to spend her spare time working out marketing strategies. In this case, she has an opportunity to share her experience with others and keep up with advancing technologies.
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