Rolling into 2012, search engines such as Google have begun to understand that keyword matching is merely a component of the equation to determine relevancy, and that the value and the authority level of the website is emerging as a larger determinant of search relevancy. That leads us to your Link Building Technique as a webmaster, small business owner, or internet entrepreneur as we start 2012.
These Five (5) Link Building Ideas bag you the backlinks and relevance you will certainly want this year:
Multiple But Relevant Links
All of us want a million backlinks to our sites, and trust me, with a small amount of cash, you can obtain them. There are lots of link building deals on Fiverr.com and sites such as The Hoist that will sell you literally hundreds of links. Trouble is, Google is focusing especially on quality and that means sites linking to yours ought to be complimentary, in the same market space in the realm, and in some way associated to your subject matter. Your landing page ought to somehow be an off shoot of the concepts put forth on the linking site. If that website has to do with exquisite meals and your page is addressed to single parents, that sort of link will likely not help you much and in reality can damage your Google rank.
So just how can you get them?
- Contact site owners wanting to swap links to start with, typically done in a resources page. This is still a sound method and has existed for years.
- Leave blog comments on articles with comparable subject matter to yours, especially authority sites (more on that later).
- Distribute your original articles for publishing on news and blog websites that are a good fit for yours.
- Post applicable links to your page on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The best are links to blog columns or landing pages applicable to Twitter trends or hash-tag listings and LinkedIn discussion groups.
Similar Neighbors
The realm of web search is going local and is placing more and more significance on local sites. Even if your business is not constricted by where you reside (like an internet SEO page that might be able to work for clients around the world), it is more helpful than ever before for local businesses to be linking to yours. Meet people in your Chamber of Commerce and promote link exchange, keeping in mind that the more relevant these businesses are to yours (and they’re regional), the better off you are. If your SEO establishment is in San Diego, encourage your local links to say “SEO San Diego” in order to make your link relevant to their viewers and provide you with the local flavor.
Authority Sites
There are a couple of primary types of authority sites in the internet world: huge, highly trafficked, content specific sites (think Inc.com, Wall Street Journal), and educational and governmental pages. Search engines are still giving lots of credit to university.edu pages and.gov pages, specifically federal government (who knew).
The main ways to get backlinks from these pages are to deliver useful, one-of-a-kind material in the way of write-ups or post comments to pieces currently on these pages. If you’re fortunate enough to hand in great content and get yourself published on a high-authority site and that is worth its weight in gold to your link building technique.
Don’t waste your time by auto-posting scraping applications that will write nonsense comments for you. They’ll go up but in most cases be deleted in the auditing of the website. You can search the web and uncover listings of high PR.edu and.gov websites (those with PR of 4, 5, 6, 7) that allow forum postings with backlinks. Be careful and always check the domains applying PR Checker.
Anchor Text Techniques
This is something you can best regulate using Article Marketing strategies, where you submit material for syndication and publication on high ranking sites. The actual words your link, named anchor text; need to be appropriate to both the page on the website that is displaying your work, but additionally to the destination site that the hyperlink goes to. That means that if you are linking “click here” you’re missing half the value of the link technique.
So how does this work? Back to the gourmet cooking site. You publish a write-up on that blog about your best ways to employ cooking wine at home, then in the body of the article, you link red wine reduction recipe to, you got it, a webpage that consists of just that. Give that fella a cigar!
Landing Pages
We just talked about how your landing pages ought to be pertinent to the link. You should also be linking to various pages on your website, commonly called deep links, and not only your homepage. This technique ought to be as natural if your site is organized properly with a product page for every product and a blog post for each unique idea you may be linking to. This informs the search engines that your domain is material rich on numerous pages, and that is key to you earning the relevance prize.
Is doing this stuff easy? Nope, but that’s the point. You’re doing it the right way, and that practice will benefit Linkbuilders in 2012.
About the Author: Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms build competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. His Smart Blog covers leadership, business communication, sales & service, online marketing and virtual business, and was recently named by Buyerzone as one of the Top 20 Business Blogs of 2011. He is the author of Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, has been a featured expert for Inc.com with articles published in Selling Power, America Online, and Site Pro News to name a few, and blogs frequently for Rank My Website, a top San Diego SEO Services firm.