What Are “Good” Linkbuilding Strategies And How To Build Them.
Linkbuilding is still the most valuable action you can take in order to get your site to rank highly in Google. Why?
Simply stated, links are the basic connector between sites on the web. They are the key to establishing your relationship to the rest of the internet. So obviously then, the more relationships you have online, the higher your relevance in the eyes of the search engines. Though just like in real life, the quality of those relationships matter in terms of your rank worthiness. Building good links online will bring the most relevant traffic to your site.
What are good links?
Good quality backlinks are from sites which have a moderate/high pagerank (good quality content, authoritative). Bad quality links are those which have a low page rank and have very little content (mostly ads) and are sometimes referred to as “linkfarms.” Bottom line is it’s better to trade links with legitimate businesses and create friendships rather than just to trade links with whoever is willing.
So how do you build those enigmatic “good”links?
1. Create Lists
People Will Link To Them Create lists of things i.e a “101 list” people love these and will share them around the web. Linking back to your site. Have a dog grooming business/website? Create a “101 cutest dog pics ever!” There are all sorts of examples of lists; lists of experts, top 10 lists etc. Stick to your niche and make your content engaging and compelling and these lists will naturally become easy to link to.
2. Distribute Content
Write articles and press releases (when you have news to share). Undoubtably your industry has a news site to which you can submit your article to. Good article sites such as squidoo.com, buzzle.com or ezinearticles.com to name a few, (there are hundreds) generally rank highly and will send you relevant traffic your way. Pro Tip: Keep track of who picks up your content and offer them ongoing exclusive offers!
3. Be Social
Social Media is a newer and exciting way to engage an audience and share ideas. Create a Facebook page for your business and ask your friends to “like” it you can get some traffic back to your site this way and if you keep your page updated you can keep a steady stream of people going back to your site and possibly linking to you. Twitter is a more overt way of promoting businesses and ideas.
You can link to the articles you write from your twitter posts. Mashable.com does this effectively and brilliantly with a steady stream of tweets on a variety of topics. More and more LinkedIn is becoming an excellent way of promoting your business by creating a profile, joining industry groups and commenting in forums. You can add a signature link in your posts. Be careful not to slip into posting only when you can add links to your site in a post area though, people will view this behavior as “spammy.”
4. Reciprocal Linking
Link trading with relevant partners that will send relevant traffic (not hubs or farms, bad links, remember)? Search engines are getting smarter and they will weed out link partners that list hundreds of off topic links over time. Think long term when link building with partners; think links from within your content linking out to other trusted content. These type of links will have the best chance of ranking highly long term.
This is a whole art in and of itself, you can go it alone or hire some link experts (HINT HINT) to do it for you. Just remember to make friends online you have to play nice. Think “take a penny, leave a penny.”
Of course there are many more ways to get good links and these are just the few we like best. Good luck and happy linking!