SEO Link Building Starter Kit

Posted by Ahmad Barirani in Marketing      4 comments

Dec
19

There is popular belief that good content is what will give a high ranking to a web page, but that’s not all there is to SEO as link building can sometimes be more important. The fact is that Google page ranking model is based on the number of web pages linking to a given page. These are called backlinks in SEO terms. Basically, a page that has more backlinks than other pages will have a higher pagerank than those pages and will, therefore, appear at a higher position in SERPs. Also, the linking page’s rank is transferred to the linked page’s rank. In other words, all links are  not worth the same as it is  better to get linked from a page that has a high ranking than one that has a lower one.

Naturally, link building becomes an important part of SEO tasks. In this post, I would like to describe the most common techniques used to get backlinks to a website. The link building list here is the result of surveying some of the most important SEO articles and blogs. Since I didn’t want to enumerate the totality of techniques that are described in these posts, I chose those that come most often and that are part of the basics of link building. After all, this is a starter kit and the point here is not to become a link building guru.

Link building techniques

• Directories: This is one the most popular way to get backlinks. Directories are websites that classify and list other websites. Of course, not all directories aren’t good. The most popular and selective is DMOZ and being indexed there is always a good thing. Now, you have to be careful about the directory you pick. Some of them aren’t really well ranked and being listed there is going to do more harm than good to your ranking.
• Webrings: these are a collection of websites that are linked together in a circular structure. When you join a webring, you will have to add a link to the previous and next website of the ring. Again you have to be careful what you link to here. If you link to a spammy website or a spammy website links to you, you will end up with more remorse than rewards.
• Link exchange: The point here is to contact webmasters and ask for having a link to your web page. Of course, nothing is free in this world and common courtesy is to give a link back. A few principle of good mannerism are needed here to make the effort be profitable. It is very easy to offend someone you never talked to before. As a rule of thumb, give before you take.
• Paid links: Whether you pay a directory, blogger or webmaster, the idea here is to receive a link in exchange of money. You would be amazed to see how this technique is effective, but once again, you will need to have to show common courtesy. The advantage of this techniques with link exchange is that you don’t have to give a link back.
• Have great content: if your page offers something unique or just plain fun, it will get linked by other pages. This is the whole point with Google page rank model as pages of better quality are supposed to get more links than pages of lower quality. You can find a lot of tips on how to write great content. Generally, Top 10, How to and link articles are a good way to get links.
• Article submission: write articles on EzineArticles and ArticlesBase. These sites have good page ranks so you can write an article with a link to your site which will inherit from the page rank.
• Social bookmarking: social bookmarking can be useful at many levels. Here a list of DoFollow social bookmarking sites that can be used for this purpose. Another trick is to have social bookmarking buttons on your page. This might encourage a few to bookmark your page. This will bring you traffic and a couple of links with minimum effort.
• DoFollow blogs commenting: Some people spend a lot of time commenting on blogs thinking their website will get better page ranking. The truth is that most blogs add the rel=”nofollow” tag to links in their post comments which will not transfer ranking to those website. However, there are a few blogs who don’t add rel=”nofollow” to their comments. Look around DoFollow blog directories to find a couple of these blogs in your niche and you will get yourself a couple of DoFollow backlinks. But don’t forget that Google will penalize websites that spam through comments. So when you comment blogs, make sure you do it in ethical way. As a general rule, content created on social media should add value. If you can’t justify the reason why you added a comment to a blog post, other than that you wanted to have a link, then it is going to be risky in the eyes of the bot.
• Forums: Yes. anything in the hands of SEO professionals can be turned into a link building weapon. Forums are no exception. Again, forum spamming should be avoided as it could have a perverse effect on page rank. The same common sense as for blog comments should be followed here.
• Link Baiting: this is a very effective way of creating links. Let’s say you are web design consultant and that you happen to have built a couple of cool WordPress themes. Why not give some of them for free. All you have to do is to make sure there is a link from that theme to your website. What’s going to happen is that all those who will use your theme will “give” you a backlink.

Conclusion: build a strong network

If you sum up all these techniques here, something will strike out: they are all time consuming. Why, because you need to do a lot of things manually. My advice is that you need to have a couple of SEO friends if you want to be productive. The value of a network is exponential compared to the number of nodes. The more you will have friends, easier it will be to exchange useful links, get bookmarked, join a clean webring and even get linked because of your great content.

What makes the difference between an top SEO and an average SEO professional is the size and quality of the network. Top SEO people will have good connection withing the search engine industry. They might befriend a couple of Google people and they will have a lot of collaboration with other SEO guys. As a result, they know how to optimize a web page so it looks good to the bot and the know can get a lot of backlinks fast.