If you are involved in internet marketing, one of the things that you’ll have to do is build links to your pages. Links are a vital part of internet marketing, because they convince the search engines to rank your pages and websites higher. In this article, we will be covering SEO link building strategies in great detail in order to understand how to use link building to improve your websites.
What is SEO?
The word SEO stands for search engine optimization. When most people think about SEO, they think about changing their HTML titles or descriptions, or targeting keywords. That is a part of search engine optimization, but there is a lot more to it than that, including link building. In order to understand why link building is so important, you first need to understand what the various methods of search engine optimization are.
SEO Methods & Tactics
Understanding some of the methods and tactics of search engine optimization will help you to understand link building better because of the relationship between link building and these other tactics. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Image Tags
One of the ways that websites can be optimized for specific keywords is by using image “ALT” tags. These images are inserted to improve the quality of your website, but they don’t do much for SEO unless you change the tags to reflect the keywords that you are targeting.
Site Mapping
Site mapping includes including your keyword in your HTML description and in your HTML title, as well as making use of page headers so that Google’s robots can see what your page is about. There are dozens of things that you can do to ensure that your site is reflecting your keywords properly, including ensuring URLs contain them and much more.
Content
Of course, content is the key to getting ranked for certain keyword phrases. When you create fresh content that is well written, relevant and contains the keywords you want to get indexed for at the proper density, you are definitely optimizing your website for search.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is another important strategy when it comes to on-site optimization. You should link keyword phrases to other relevant pages on your side because the Google spiders will follow those links and you will get a more robust search engine listing.
The Most Important Link Building Strategies
Now, we're going to look at the most important link building strategies in great detail so that you can understand them completely and be able to use them in your own marketing efforts. There are a lot of link building strategies out there, but these are the ones that are absolutely vital to ensuring that your site is ranking as high as possible, and they are probably the only ones that you will ever need.
Quality
The first link building strategy that we're going to discuss is quality. Quality is the most important link building strategy that you have. If you do not have a quality website, then all the links in the world are going to help you. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly Google wants from a website, but they definitely let you know what you shouldn't do.
Some of the things that Google hates include low quality guest posting, syndicating your content, scraping your content from higher-ranked sites, creating doorway sites to drive traffic to your main site and a few others. By looking at What Google doesn't want you to do, you can figure out pretty clearly what they do want. Google wants extremely high-quality content that does not come from another website and is not released to other websites by the owner of the content. Plus, they do not want low-quality sites directing traffic to the main site.
One other thing that you should keep in mind if you are doing an affiliate site is that Google does not like it when you just simply copy the descriptions from the company that you are an affiliate for. If you want to rank then you need to come up with your own descriptions.
Diversification
The next strategy that we will discuss is link diversification. If you choose one method of building links, you are not going to get ranked high no matter how much effort you put in. You can get as many links as you want using one particular method, but you aren't going to be ranked as high as the next site that has fewer links but more diversification.
There's no particular formula when it comes to diversification, but you do want to keep in mind that there are lots of strategies out there and you should be using as many of them as possible. For example, you should be creating quality content that links back to your site. You should also be promoting this content. In addition, you should be seeking out links from actual trusted sites and using social media to create high engagement and send traffic back to your website. You can send out syndicated content as long as it isn't already posted on your website. In fact, syndicating content is one of the best ways to build links if you publish with trusted sites.
Relevance
Next, we're going to discuss relevance. The quality of your site is extremely important. However the relevance of the sites linking to you and other factors is almost nearly as important. If you are getting links from sites that have nothing to do with your own they are almost worthless. However, if you are getting links from relevant sites, even if they are low quality, they're worth a little. Here are some ways that you can ensure that you are relevant.
Make sure that the site that is linking to you either specializes in your industry or has a section featuring that industry. You should be especially careful when it comes to earned links. They need to come from a site within your industry. If you do get links from sites that are not related to your content or industry, then there has to be some legitimate reason for them to be linking to your content. Finally, make sure that your earned links are coming from pages where the content actually reflects your industry and if possible, using a keyword that is related to the page that it's being linked to.
Stand Out
The next link technique is less of an actual technique and more of a ‘don't do this’ sort of thing; one thing that some websites do that gets them no love from Google is by using the exact same link strategy as the sites that they are trying to rank higher than. In fact, in some of these sites actually try to get links from the same places as their competitors and follow their linking exactly.
But Google doesn't want you to follow the same link strategies as your competitors. Instead, they want you to build your brand. The only way that you can build your brand and actually get it to be a unique identity on the web is by coming up with your own strategies and having your own methods. Google wants to see that you are blazing your own trail when it comes to link building and linking strategies.
Anchor Text
You already know that quality content is the number one priority when it comes to link building. But anchor text is also extremely important. However, there are a couple of important things not to do when you're using anchor text. First of all, make sure that you are not using your keywords for all of the outbound links on your site. This is a technique that not only doesn't work, but it actually hurts you in the search engines.
You want to have natural seeming links coming into your site. That means that sometimes you will have the key word related to your contact and sometimes you won't. Of course, the best way to get natural links is by building them naturally. But if you are linking to your own site, make sure that you vary the anchor text considerably and add some links where that anchor text is not relevant to your side at all.
Social Media
Sometimes internet marketers fail to realize the importance of social media when it comes to link building. While you can't get a whole lot of diversified link juice from your own social media accounts, the fact that you were able to influence people on social media and have it connected with your main website is going to go a long way towards building your credibility as a brand and an influencer in the industry.
Any internet marketers should have social media accounts on all the major networks including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and even YouTube can be a great place to link back to your main site. There may be a few more but these are the bare minimum that you need to have social media accounts for. That’s because in 2012, Google start incorporating social signals into its search algorithms, which meant that content that was shared on social media was going to rank higher. So, not only should you have the social media accounts, but you should encourage sharing by others on social media networks.
Conclusion
There are lots of link building strategies out there, but the ones that are listed here are the most important ones and the ones that you should be focusing on. These link building strategies will be able to take your page from basically an unknown one to something that is ranked fairly high for some of the keywords that you'll be targeting. However, there may be other link building strategies that will also work for you, and so you should research the topic further and always be looking for new strategies to use techniques to use.
