Top Seven Effective Link Building Strategies
by Herman Drost
If you’re an online business owner you know that generating traffic to your website and
converting that traffic into sales is the lifeblood of your business. One of the best ways
of generating free traffic is getting high rankings in the search engines. In order to achieve
high rankings you need lots of inbound links. The quantity, quality and relevance of these
links are the main factors why search engines will rank one site ahead of another. Incorrect
link building will lower your rankings and kill your traffic.
Recently many websites lost their search engine rankings after the Penguin Update because
they didn’t acquire their links naturally. Webmasters who subscribed to automated link building
software, link farms or received all their links from a single source lost their rankings resulting
in lack of sales. Their website was no longer on the first page of Google.
Top Seven effective link building strategies
1. Create quality content
If your content offers solutions to the most pressing problems of your customers they’ll
want to share the information with their friends and keep coming back for more. When creating
content, think from your customer’s viewpoint rather than your own so others will link to your
content naturally.
2. Get links from quality websites
Quality trumps quantity when it comes to link building. For instance a link from CNN
will trump a link from a new website because CNN is recognized as an authority website that
has gained 1000s of inbounds links (contains lots of link juice). A link from an authority
website will instantly increase your rankings.
When seeking inbound links look for sites that contain lots of link juice. A single link
from a high quality site will trump inbound links from 100 low quality sites.
3. Get links from relevant websites
Links from sites unrelated to yours may lower your rankings because Google will think
you’re engaging in link spam. This refers to stockpiling hundreds of links from unrelated sources.
For instance it makes no sense getting a link from a gambling site if your website is selling
camping equipment.
One method of quickly finding relevant links is to use keyword qualifiers. For example
if searching for directories related to camping equipment enter “camping equipment+directories”
in the Google search box.
4. Get links from a variety of websites
Getting all your inbound links from one resource makes it obvious you’re trying to game
the search engines. For instance don’t just submit your content to article directories, but
also get links from blogs, forums, news sites and shopping sites. Also participate in guest
blogging, social marketing, video marketing, ebook marketing, etc. The key is to vary the number
of links pointing to your content so publish it on a variety of web properties.
5. Reverse engineer links from your competitors
Established websites invest lots of time finding other sites to link to them. Why not
try to get these same sites to link to yours? Using a backlink tool such as Market Samurai
you can quickly find sites your competitors are linked to and get them to link to your site
as well. This will save you a lot of time.
6. Social media
Search engines now use social media signals to rank websites. This means you should no
longer ignore conversations related to your niche on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google
Plus. Create accounts on these properties and submit content to them on a regular basis.
7. Consistency
Link building won’t be successful if you just do it one time (e.g. purchase a packet
of 1000 links). This not only looks unnatural but may result in lowering your rankings. Link
building must be done on a consistent basis to be effective therefore schedule time each week
to get inbound links to your website and over time you’ll see your rankings steadily increase.
Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer, owner and author of
www.isitebuild.com Learn how to write
and submit articles to generate and convert traffic into sales Visit:
Article Marketing Strategies
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