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Link Building Strategies & Tips

#1 Buy/Build Links on Sites Relevant to Yours

Links on relevant sites are more powerful and should be the primary focus of your link building/buying efforts. While links on irrelevant sites will still help, they will not help as much. There is also the question of what exactly "relevant" means. Is it possible for two sites to be related without being in the same category? For example a site about cars may be relevant to a site about stereos even though they are different things. I like to think of relevancy in this way; Would the users on "Site A" be interested in the content on "Site B". A good example of this is the topics link building and web design. While the subjects are completely different, most link builders are interested in web design information and vice versa.

#2 Use Your Primary Keywords in the Anchor Text of Your Links

The anchor text, also known as link text, is the text used in the link pointing to your site. This text should be one of your primary keywords for the page that you are linking too. For example, if you are linking to your homepage which is optimized for the keyword "Mortgages", you will want to use that keyword in the links pointing to that page. The search engines look at the link text of your incoming links to help determine what your site is about. Optimizing the anchor text of your links can have a huge effect on your rankings.

Another important point is that you should not overuse any one keyword. It looks unnatural if all of your links have the same anchor text. Generally speaking, you only have to worry about overusing a keyword in your anchor text if you are buying hundreds or thousands of links. If you are just buying a few links then there is nothing to worry about.

An example of link text would be the word "Buy Links" in this link which points to Textlinkbrokers Buy Links

#3 Leave your links up long enough for them to help

It can take weeks for the search engines to see any new links that you purchase. It can also take months before those links improve your rankings. It takes the search engines a good amount of time to find and recalculate all the web pages and links on the internet. Ranking changes can happen daily but they are usually due to changes done a few months back. You should plan, and budget, to keep your links up for at least 90 days. Any time shorter then that would not be sufficient to accurately gauge ROI. With that being said tip #4 talks about tracking your keyword rankings, in order to watch improvements.

In addition, one of the newest additions to Google's link popularity algorithm is Link Age. In order to combat manipulation of its system by link builders, Age now plays a major role in determining the value of a link. So, keep your links up for as long as possible. This is one of the primary reasons we developed our Permanent Links Program. Our permanent links have been used by thousands of our customers with great results. See our Client Rankings List for examples of our client's successes.

#4 Track your Results Using a Keyword Rank Tracking Software

It is very important that you track the results of your link buying efforts. By tracking your keyword rankings you can see exactly how your links are helping. Most webmasters only track the traffic coming to their site. While this is helpful, it is important to know that you will not see any significant traffic from a keyword until you have reached the top 10.

Many webmasters spend significant resources on link building only to give up because they are not seeing significant traffic increases after a few months. If those same webmasters were tracking their keywords they would probably find that they have made significant progress toward reaching the top 10. It does not make sense to give up with the finish line in site. I cannot tell you how many customers we have served that had no clue that they had improved their rankings from the top 100's to the top 20's, only to give up because they had no clue that of the major improvements that had happened.

10 Free Super Simple Back-Link Building Tips

After reading a thread in a forum with some frankly crap link building advice I thought I’d give it my ten bob.

1. Don’t get a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 7th page of a forum thread, unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself
2. If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!
3. So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one.
4. You need to get into the good neighbourhoods. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. For instance, try and get a link from a .gov site!
5. See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours
6. Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer - making it one of my most used seo tools.
7. Don’t waste your time with seo tools! Join Social Network tools like Delicious, Technorati and Stumble. There’s three links right there, although to be fair, they are not actually counted as linksby Google becasue of the Nofollow attribute. Digg links count, though.
8. A link is a link. If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (negates the value of the link, almost) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.
9. It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar is out of date.
10. Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from it’s who you link to - this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.

Obviously I assume you have a blog with original content on it! And remember it’s quality of links not quantity. What, you want a bonus one as is normal blog etiquette?

Sod it - I can’t be bothered.

Natural Link Building Top 20 Tips

With all this talk of link buying and how it can effectively cause your much valued website to drop out of the serps altogether, maybe it’s time to review your methods of acquiring links and for us to discuss the steps to take in find good websites to link to that add value to your own site.

Sifting through the many sites out there is without doubt a laborious process and requires time and dedication. A good link builder needs to take into account a multitude of considerations, mainly how the acquired link will affect the website not only now but in the future too.

Lets make a list of tips for link building. I’ll start the ball rolling, by the end of comments I will compile the top 20 tips so you too can become a professional link builder.

1) Check out backlinks to your competitors website, make a list of these links and by the time you have researched a number of sites you should start to see a pattern emerging.

2) When negotiating links, think very carefully as to the angle you will approach the webmaster with. OK, that link may benefit you, but what does he/she get in return ?

3) What methods will you employ to make sure the links remain on your chosen site ?

4) ( I always struggle with this one) Determine if the site is a good linking partner. What’s the nature of the site? What impact will it have on your site if you link to it ? Who owns the site ? ( Some people such as Dave get a gut feeling about a site, but here we need to establish a definite method for filtering out the crap)

Link Building Tips

As we all know link building is the major and has been the major hot topic in the seo world for yerrs.Lets go back to the beginning before the existence of the artificial intelligent search engines, with very smart and clever algothirms. The old days were great the only way to really get your site noticed was word of mouth - posting your link in forums and other discussion so that people would actually be interested and click on your site. Nowadays the links are still there but are perceived in such a different way now we need to obtain them links not to be clicked on but to be picked up by the search engines spiders. Here we have a look at ways to obtaining these:

Natural Links

Natural links are the best way possible to obtain rankings but are very hard the key is to keep writing unique relevant content and eventually people will start linking back to you. Another half natural way is to submit your sites to top directories this will cause a bounce on effect as most small directories extract content and listings from the larger ones giving you quality one-way links.

Paid Links

Paid links is very much disapproved by most major search engines due to the fact that links are meant to be given to you in a natural way by webmasters because they enjoy your content or what you have to offer. Purchasing links does some what the opposite as it is like paying your way up the SERPs. In the end we all know that gaining links naturally is a very hard task these days as there are billions of web pages, so the best advice fo buying links is find sites that do not tell the whole world they are selling links as the search engines will find out and penalize every site that is involved.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal Links have also been somewhat devalued by the search engines lately especially with google due to the same reasons as above, we still think reciprocal links do still have slight value so try and get links that are the same theme as your site and related to the users - and again try to just obtain these via one on one discussions with the webmaster in question.

Three way links

We feel that three way links are a much better alternative than reciprocal linking as there is more weight on these sort of links due to the fact that the site that links back to you, you do not have to link back to them. e.g If we link to www.wordpress.org and they link back to us from a totally different site they have.

Article Links

Article links are a very good way to obtain natural backlinks especially with the rise of social media sites. The way to do this is write a great article or a news flash on your niche. Submit them to sites such as Digg or Propeller and once popular they will bring you in a ton of natural backlinks which the search engine will love.

So whatever ways you decide to do remember stick to the search engines guidelines, as you can never trick them.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.
Directories

1. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.
Forum Spam

2. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

3. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

4. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

5. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

6. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

7. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

8. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.
Blog Spam

9. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

10. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

11. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

12. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

13. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

14. Don't even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.
Garbage Link Exchanges

15. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

16. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

17. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

18. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.
Spam People in Person

19. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

20. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.
Be Persistant

21. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

22. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

23. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

24. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.
Getting Links by Being a Jerk

25. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

26. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

27. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

28. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say "excuse you, jerk".

29. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

30. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more "hilariously dumb" than it is a "bad linking practice".

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library's Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned 'PR' (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn't get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don't forget the "Designed by example.com" bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.