In the early days link building was like the Wild West. There was many questionable practices in play. It can be difficult to shake old habits, especially when they used to work so well. But those tactics no longer work. Modern day search engines are not fooled by the tricks of the old days, leaving you having to deal with penalties to your website if you don’t give up your old tricks. In this article I will be telling you the 7 best methods of link building without risking penalties.
1: Link To Your Most Relevant Page
Don’t just link everything to your home page. Even if the links are genuine, Google can misread the signals and think it looks spammy. If someone is writing about your brand, it is natural to link to the home page, however if they are talking about a particular product or service they will generally link to that page. For example if I was talking about our PPC services I wouldn’t link to our home page, but to our Google Adwords page, see what I did there. Keep this in mind when implementing your own link building strategies. Link to your content as a normal user would.
2: Avoid Paying For Links
Paying for links was one of the most effective way to rank highly in previous iterations of the internet. This is not the case anymore. Google scans for suspicious linking activity and hands out penalties to anyone suspected. Sure if you buy one link from a highly relevant site, you probably won’t get caught. But how do you know they haven’t been selling links to multiple people? As the list of questionable links grows, Google’s algorithms will find the trend and everyone involved will be penalised. It’s just not worth it.
3: Vary Your Anchor Text
Internal linking to your website is a great way to improve your position in SERP’s. However if you use the same anchor text linking to the same page often enough, it actually does more harm than good. Google sees this type of activity as suspicious, leading to more painful ranking penalties. Mixing up your anchor text using relevant words is the only way you can successfully utilise this type of strategy.
4: Link Building Consistently
Link building is something that must be done consistently and over time. If you build hundreds of links yourself everyday it won’t take long before every search engine sees what you are doing. Similarly if you have a strong link building strategy but all of a sudden you stop and allow it to lie dormant for a few months, search engines will see that this isn’t an accurate portrayal of how natural link building works. This results in more penalties. So build your links consistently and keep at it.
5: Make Sure Your Links Are Useful
When building a link, make sure it is useful to the user and actually serves a purpose. Never just insert a link for the sake of it. If it doesn’t add value, it shouldn’t get built. Keeping to this rule will also help you to gauge whether or not your links are relevant. For example if you own an oil company and you are on a forum where someone is asking a question about sandwiches, a link to you oil company’s page would be useless to that person and highly irrelevant.
6: Take Advantage Of Social Media
Social media should always be included in your link building strategy. It’s not completely clear just how effective a link from a large social media site like Facebook actually is for your link building strategies. But if you already have the content, it gives you an opportunity to share it with a wider community. The people you reach may just become your fans and link you themselves in the future.
7: Don’t Duplicate Content For Extra Links
Another method of building links is to write content about your company, products or services on another website. This is fine if you are creating an original piece of content. It can be tempting to use content that you have already published, but you have to fight the urge. Putting the same piece of content onto multiple websites seems like an easy way to get links, but it will leave you worse off than when you started. If you are guest posting, write original blogs/articles for the audience of the site you will be featured on.
This has Link Building: The 7 Best Methods. So in conclusion remember to link to your most relevant page, never pay for links, vary your anchor text, build links consistently (not too quick not too slow), only place links where they are useful and relevant to the user, post links to social media and finally never duplicate your content. As an easy to remember rule of thumb, don’t do any one strategy to an excess, it looks unnatural and usually ends up with a penalisation for your site.
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