Link building is one of the most important processes in any SEO campaign. This is a universal Link building tutorial. Whether your website is new or old, it is assured that you will definitely get something useful from this discussion. Before we start discussing complex SEO strategies related to link building, it is important to understand link building definition properly and its importance in your SEO campaign. After understanding it, we will move our discussion to various link building techniques and strategies. At the end of the discussion we have prepared link building checklist that describes what you should do and what not to do while your SEO campaign and especially while building links. So let us begin now.
What is Link Building?
In the process of link building, hyperlinks are acquired from other hyperlinks that redirect to your own website. A hyperlink that is normally referred as a link is a medium through which internet users can browse or switch between pages. For search engine robots, these links serve as a bridge between various pages and ultimately websites. With these links, they crawl between pages between entire website structures. Multiple techniques can be applied to build links that tend to vary in difficulty. Some might seem easy to you and some might not. However, when talking about the overall process, link building is the hardest job in SEO campaign. Majority of the time in any SEO campaign needs to be spent on building links. Thus, if you acquire enough skills and knowledge to build quality links, you can easily surpass other SEOs and your competitive websites as well.
Now we can discuss how this process will actually benefit your website and ultimately your business.
Importance of Link building
After understanding link building definition, here is what are the benefits your website is about to get from this strategies. As described before hyperlinks are used by search engine robots in order to browse various web pages and ultimately to scan multiples website. Having a large number of hyperlinks pointing towards your website will tell search engine that you website has relevant content matching to the search. This will slightly provide you edge over other websites and ultimately improve ranking of your website in search engine results. After knowing the advantages, one may definitely want to improve their rankings with this strategy. Going forward in the discussion, we will be describing various link building techniques that would be useful for your new and old website as well as established website that are doing it from a significant period now.
Link building techniques
Despite of being a useful SEO technique, many aspects / factors related to this techniques are not considered legal or appropriate by most of the search engine bots and especially for Google. It ultimately makes the job even harder since there is always a risk of getting penalized if things are not done appropriately. However, completing this job properly will be throwing a lot of advantages towards your online business so the effort is worth giving a try. Following list of link building techniques is prepared based on various strategies used by SEO agencies and much small online business. Here are some most useful techniques that do not involve the risk of getting penalized.
- Building Helpful Tools for Industry:
Unique tools are required in every industry that makes life easier. There are plentiful of tools that can be packaged and sold in form of a product to generate business revenue, however, there are a lot of comparatively small sized tolls that cannot be turned into a business product despite of their usefulness. There are plentiful of free tools that can be useful for SEO. Such tools can be enhanced and developed into larger tools that can be sold in industry and generate some business value.
- Ask for backlinks:
This is one of the best ways for beginners. In this process, your friends, relatives, colleagues, partners or clients would be helpful if they own a blog, website or online store. Simply ask them for providing a link for you website. Remember that link should be added as in-contact link instead of sidebar or footer. Use this method only if your websites fall under same niche otherwise it will be harmful and has no to negative impact on you website.
- Developing Relationship:
Good relationships are essential for quality link building. You will come across plenty of chances of building new contacts. To begin, start with communities such as forums, blogs and social groups that follow the same niche or area that your website does. Process begins by providing them contribution by providing them valuable comments related to their content. It will increase the value of discussion. This will not only provide you with backlinks but also keep you updated with latest news and content of the industry since that blog falls under similar niche. It will help to share your business and passion with people related with your field
- Testimonial:
It is much like a win-win scenario. There are many online businesses that give you opportunity to review their services and your experience with them. Doing this will not only build customer trust but also provides opportunity to build more potential traffic compared to email requests for backlinks. Another testimonial for placing their website would be created for the contact and a new incoming link would be easily created.
- Blogging:
This is not as simple as it looks. You just cannot create a blog with single post and backlink it with your website. This would be total waste of time and increase the risk of getting panelized by search engines. If you want to raw traffic to your website through your blog, the blog needs to be kept active. All you need to do is to keep our blog updated with latest information of your field. Each post should target your customer requirements. It will provide the authority by search engine for back linking. Make it sure that every content of your blog is relevant, useful and well-structured. It is the only way for making it top in the search engine raking. This is how backlinks can be earned through blogs.
- Listing your website in trustworthy directories:
There are many directories that are excluded from almost every search engine’s results. You will never want your website to be on such web pages since they do not generate any value but risk of getting excluded. However, there are some good online directories too. These directories would provide you with a chance of serving your potential customers with your website link along with useful and relevant information about your website. You definitely want your website to be on such list. There are many directories that fall under a particular niche o industry. They are always a good choice. Listing your website in them will help you to target audience from specific field and help major search engine and ultimately people, to find you online.
To getting started, dmoz is a good choice. It is the largest online public directory that is maintained by a vast and global community of volunteer editors. You can simply test it to ensure that such directories are really helpful in your niche or not.
- Preparing Quality guest posts:
There are number of sites and blogs that allow volunteer writers to write and publish their articles on their platform. Before choosing one, note following things:
- The website should follow the same niche as yours
- Article is not all about your or your company’s greatness
- Article should be interesting, well written and should sound professional
- All you get is bad reputation with a bad article
Remember that links can either affect your website positively or negatively. Always keep in mind that your links are relevant and associated with good content. This will keep your customers happy and your business growing. Google and other major search engines will keep you on top of the list and your business growing with each search query made relevant to your website.
We hope that these link building tutorial and techniques would help you draw some quality audience towards your website who are possibly you to-be customers. Discussion is not going to end this sooner since link building was never a child’s play and neither it is now. You should always remember that techniques and tutorials described here are not hundred percent clean. If you try too hard with any of them, it will only cause damage to you website’s reputation.
Now moving forward, we are presenting a list or say a link building checklist that will describe what you should do and what you should not in your SEO campaign related to link building. We hope this link will give you clear idea about what are the pros and cons of link building and where to keep caution.
Link building checklist
- What to do?
- To draw possible user and customers, build links on relevant websites only. Irrelevant traffic is no use of yours so always build links on websites from similar niche.
- Build your links on quality website. If your website is getting exposed on high reputation websites, it will increase you reputation and authority in the industry too.
- Build links on active and relevant websites only. Of course you are not building links only for the sake of having take. Your main target is active traffic that is your possible customers. This will increase your audience and ultimately build trust for your website.
- While the process, avoid targeting websites that are penalized by search engines. If your website links are present at such website, it will too get accused of guideline violation and eventually get penalized.
- Target your local website. This will surely help you to drive traffic from your locality so you get more public engagement with your business.
- Avoid repeating keywords of your content too much. Doing so will risk of Google detecting the violation terms and a certain result of penalty.
- Never be over dependant on a single source of links. There are a lot of other opportunities and you should ignore none of them.
- What not to do?
- Avoid creating links on directories containing articles.
- Avoid websites that contain even a little amount of pornographic content, do you need an explanation? I don’t think so.
- Do not just run behind do-follow links, it will make your profile look unnatural. Mix up some no-follow links to. It will not only make your profile look clean but also provide some probability of getting good results from no-follow links. After all, they are back links too!
- When writing guest articles, do not create links in author bio section. It would be too easy to ignore for any search engine robots and will raise the risk only.
- Don’t exchange or buy links, just don’t!
- Do not make links for your homepage only, there is a lot of content on your website waiting for exposure on major sites, do it for them too!
- In anchor text, avoid using keywords such as cheap, affordable, free, etc, etc. It clearly indicated that the content is either promotional or is written for advertisement purpose.
- Do not limit your criteria only for source links. Of course they help a lot in SEO campaign, but there are many individual links to, waiting just for you!
- Avoid participating in link exchange, never!
With this list, out discussion comes to an end too! We hope that his link building checklist and link building tutorial described above would definitely help you to get quality backlinks for your website, online store and even for blogs. With this knowledgebase, you are all set to begin with your link building campaign. By keeping these techniques and checklist in mind, you can save yourself from going to violated approaches and ultimately from getting penalized.