SEO Consult Blog

Conventional link building methods are losing their value. Things like directory submission for example. Google no longer recommends high quality paid directories and in fact in the near future we may see any methods for artificial linking building being frowned on by search engines.

Still there are companies who continue to spend a vast amount of their budget on links although this form of link acquisition has not been allowed by Google for some time now. In fact, some high profile websites have already been penalised for continuing this practice.

Still the urge to spend money on link building is no surprise, especially by a sector of the SEO industry that is considered low quality, if not shady.

Natural Links requires investment

Apart from money, natural links also require time and resources as well as the ‘know how’ in industries such as web design or web development. The investment required does not get spent directly on the links, but rather on the actual web venture that gets the links in a natural and sustainable way, over time. While offers of free links are appealing, they are often of a low quality and can lead to trouble.

Stop the practice of artificial link building and concentrate instead on getting links naturally.

Ways to get links naturally

Start by creating a resource list and keep it updated on a regular basis. You can also program free tools or software which everybody needs but which is not yet being offered to everybody. Develop your theme or template and make sure it is of a high quality or program a popular blog platform plug-in.

Arrange a competition which is both genuine and recurring, once a year is sufficient, or you could also organize a recurring charitable event. Forge relationships with providers similar to you and try to join forces with them. You could also build a community which people are proud to be part of and which they are happy to display on their own websites.

Support others with cheap, if not free, web hosting or anything else you can provide and offer to mirror a high traffic site. Offer rebates for particular groups like students or veterans or even disadvantaged groups.

Place offers of free audio download on your site or offer free e-books. You could even investigate the possibility of getting your content translated into different languages so that you can tap into the market in different countries.

Join a Social Bookmarking community site and become its star member. Offer other members free download such as wall papers or backgrounds, even the use of free icons. Offer webmasters free use of scripts and chunk codes. Give away image but make sure they fall under the category of a creative commons license.

Create and maintain a Facebook application. Offer specific groups different options on information, such as recipes or self improvement articles. Start a discussion on green initiatives and place articles relating to these issues.

Educate, especially children from poor or impoverished homes and help animals who are in distress. Boast about your accomplishments.

The Results?

If you are serious about natural linking there are countless projects based on what people need or what they are interested in which you can tap into. Free stuff is always popular and this may incur an investment on your part, but the results will be gaining links, so your investment can be turned into profit this way. You also gain a good reputation and lots of fans. When you are liked and trusted, people are willing to spend money on you.

Backlinks are so important to SEO that they have become one of the main building blocks.

What are backlinks?

Basically they are links that point directly back to your website. Some search engines place enormous importance on websites that have that a good number of quality backlinks, because they consider them more relevant than others in their results page, they award them more credit.

Calculating the relevancy of a website site to keywords, search engines take into account the amount of quality links leading to a particular site from other sites. Called inbound links, when they are found on sites which have content related to the site they are linking to, they are considered very relevant. If they are found linking to site with content that is unrelated, they are considered less relevant. Therefore, the higher their relevancy, the greater a search engines perceives their quality. Just as the more relevant the site that is linking back to your site, the better quality the backlink will be.

Search engines like a level playing field and so while it is easy to try to manipulate links for higher rankings, it is not easy to influence rankings using external backlinks from other sites, and this is one reason why backlinks feature so highly in search engine’s criteria for rankings.

Reciprocal linking

Another reason to concentrate on creating quality backlinks is so that you can use them to attract and entice visitors to your site, it isn’t enough to just build a website and ‘hope they will come’. One way to advertise your site is through reciprocal linking. I will link to you and you will in turn link back to me.

Reciprocal linking used to be one of the targets of a search engine filter and were used to boost rankings by sheer force of the inbound links reciprocal link exchanges produced, yet many of these links were not relevant resulting in inbound links being ignored while outbound links were counted. This caused the relevancy of many sites to be watered down and many dropped off search engines maps.

Reciprocal linking can also get you into trouble with a search engine if you are found linking to a bad neighbourhood and the only way to avoid this is to be choosier about who you exchange linking rights with and ignoring those that have tons of backlinks on a page as you want your website to be noticed instead of being lost in a crowd.

Things to consider in your backlink campaign

First of all keep track of them and know exactly what sites are linking back to you. You also have to know how the anchor text of the backlink integrates keywords relating to your site, if at all. There are tools for this.

It not enough to have a large amount of inbound links pointing to your site, you need to have a large amount of quality inbound links and the way to do this is to search for website with similar themes and who are likely to link to you.