Although you’ll hear that link building is dead, that’s the farthest from the truth. In fact, link building is still an important part of one’s SEO campaign strategies, but the old ways and unscrupulous ways are no longer tolerated and on top of all that, making the right mistakes will make your link building all wrong.
First of all, don’t try the old techniques and don’t even think about trying any Black Hat techniques. Google is so hip to all this that if you even try it you’ll be penalized viciously and probably with no redemption whatsoever. The reason for all this is obvious, it’s due to the excessive abuse of SEO with bloated link building tactics that gave little or no value to the surfer and thus made the search engines look weak and tepid, not providing search engine results that benefited the surfers overall.
The pickins aren’t slim, however, if you adopt the smart and favorable procedures that are proving to be quite effective and rewarding.
The bottom line here is to be honest and not greedy. Don’t listen to nonsensical techniques that aren’t backed by sound good sense. The key to successful link building is to get as many authoritative links as possible and keep them active and rolling in. Why? Because there are sites in every niche that have proven themselves to be of great value and Google rewards them for this. When you’ve got an inbound link from an authority site, it makes your site look like one of value as well. These kinds of links are hard earned. Some try to buy them and succeed, but Google is smart to this tactic too and it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’ Google drops the hammer down on you. Instead, getting the authority links calls for one thing: great content.
Why does great content bring in the authority links? Because authority sites and their fans scour the web for posts, especially blog and social media posts that benefit their interests. When they find exceptional content they’ll boast about it. If an authority site sees said content and notices how active it is in the commentaries and ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, you’re in a good position to not only get an inbound link, but room for more posts to be featured which is the catbird seat.
Sloppy link placement is also a key factor. You don’t put links up for each and everything you can. That’s link stuffing and Google and the other search engines will clobber you for it. You need to add links where they’ll be considered of reference use, not spam. Keep outbound links to a minimum but place them correctly. Not in the first sentence unless it’s a news or breaking news story so that the surfer will know whence you’re referring to. For science based links, you should do what you would do with a term paper. Add a link ‘to’ your link at the bottom of your article under a ‘references’ tag. Use 3 references if possible here as it will look academic and not just some bloated post.
Anchor text, diversity in strategy and content, creative and catchy titles, all fall into play here and that means hiring the right writers to do the job. Hiring cheap writers will lead to a lack of quality that any search engine will detect and penalize. Getting authority links means catching the eye of authority sites and that means only great content will do that. Invest smartly here as it will pay off in the short and long term.
This calls for keeping your brand name out there. In addition, your use of brand names is of significant importance. Link when it calls for linking regarding brand names. Don’t overdo it.
Push the envelope regarding quality content especially where pics and videos and audio are concerned. People love to share this kind of content and if you want those inbound links that are diverse, then this is the way to do it. Why is this important? It’s because Google will see a variety of inbound links pertaining to each piece of content, like a video let’s say. When Google sees this, especially from social media, it says that your site is alive and kicking and your content, that particular piece of content is of use to the surfers. This where the organic traffic comes in. It shows your site isn’t buying or trading links, but is pulling them in on content integrity alone which is a powerful indicator to Google that your site is lively and of great interest.
So the bottom line here is you’ve got to earn those links and avoid the mistakes too many people make. There are many more but the ones focused here are the best groundwork to stand on.