Whether you are a seasoned veteran, or a little green newbie in Internet marketing, one thing that you need to know about is link building. If you own a website, then you probably know all about this topic. Recently, there was a massive Google update, where they changed their algorithm, known as the panda or farmer update. What this did? It essentially changed the way link building is done forever.
Google weeded out many low-quality sites that were built on and around copied or poorly spun content. About 14% of all websites on the Internet were affected by this to some degree.
In the past, Link building could be done by simply using spam tools to blast your website until it reached the top of Google. However, since the recent update, this can no longer be done, and you must be a bit more tactful in your link building strategies. Below I’m going to go over for link building strategies that work in a search engine optimization world of today.
1. High quality web 2.0 submission
This is an old link building strategy but it’s still a great way to boost a website all the way to the top. Using websites such as squidoo, weebly, and other Web 2.0 sites to get high-quality links works now more than ever (even though many pages on Squidoo and other similar sites were hurt from the Panda Update simple cause of the low quality content). However, high-quality content must be utilized, if you want to see some serious boost in your rankings.
2.Guest Blogging
This is by far the most effective marketing and link building method. You should write unique quality articles and ask bloggers on your niche to publish them on their blogs in exchange for your links. You will get only 1-2 links from each guest post but those links will be more valuable than thousands backlinks from conventional article marketing.
There are even more valuable benefits than just backlinks to your site.
First you will get targeted traffic and leads that translates to sales.
If you guest post on an authority blog on your niche you could get up to 300+ visitors in the first couple of days and those people will come to your site because they want to learn more from you not because they randomly search sites so they convert much easier
Second if you guest post regularly on blogs on your niche you will establish your self as an expert on your niche so it will be much easier to make people trust you.
The last one and probably the most important is that you will develop relations with the bloggers and their audience, those A-List bloggers are big influencers on their niche so the benefits are just priceless.
3. Social media
Google has realized that social media is the future, and as such has placed much more emphasis on the importance of link building coming from social sites to their algorithm.
Even though links from social media site are nofollow, getting a Facebook fan page link, as well as twitter links, helps to give you a diversified link scheme, that looks much more natural to the search engines and builds authority to a site.
Additionally you might have probably noticed that when you search on Google while you are sign in there, the first results are those that your friends or connections on your social accounts shared so what you share online effects the search results of your friends which makes the use of social media even more important.
4. Blog Commenting
You should find the top blogs on your niche and comment regularly, in that way you will get quality back links and targeted traffic too. (you should leave comments that contribute to the discussion and not just comment for the sake of a backlink)
It’s pretty easy to find high PR dofollow blogs, the obvious way is to search on google for “dofollow blog lists” you will find many dofollow blogs and in some cases those blogs will be categorized. In general you can find the most popular blogs on your niche by searching on sites like technorati.com or invesp.com/blog-rank which has the top blogs in any niche.
Additionally there are 2 firefox extensions that every online marketer and link builder should use, the first one is “SEO for Firefox” which will show you if a link is nofollow or dofollow and give a lot of SEO information about a site.
The second one is “SeoQuake” which will show you the PageRank, Alexa Ranking, Outbound links and much more Of every page on the search results page of Google which means that you can search on google (or any other search engine) using the keyword you want to rank and every page that google shows will have all these valuable stats (This is really powerful)
5. Video Marketing
Videos have slowly but surely become very popular in the past couple of years. Pretty much everyone, who comes online, watch videos.
Getting links from websites such as YouTube, can be a very powerful link building tactic.
Each video page on video sharing sites like YouTube usually has a PR3+ and only a few outbound links so if you create informative videos and upload them on as many video sharing sites as you can with your link on the description you will certainly get a boost on your rankings (even though these links are nofollow they still matter) additionally embedding videos on your own site will also help you rank better since google loves videos.
The most popular video sharing sites are well known (Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe etc) but you can find much more by just searching for “video sharing sites list” on Google.
The basic SEO for videos is to have your keyword inside your title (preferably at the beginning) write a description with 50-100 words and use 2-3 times your keywords, and write variations of your keyword on the video tags.
A simple trick that you can use to get more views is to search for popular videos that are relevant to your video and create a video response with your own video (you can find this next to comments of every video on Youtube). This little trick will also help your videos rank better on Google and Youtube Search (which is in fact the second most popular search engine after Google itself)
It’s better to have videos on your site but you can put them where ever you feel that is better, for example you can have a video on your home page which will be a presentation of your business, videos that could explain how a client could use your services on your service page, you could convert your blog posts to videos using PowerPoint and put them inside your post on your blog, if you are doing affiliate reviews you can create videos about those affiliate products etc…
You can even build your email list thru Youtube, find out how here : 10 Tips To Build Your Email List Using YouTube
6. Article directories
After the panda update, link building from article directories was claimed to be dead by many experts. However, submitting articles to these directories still has a powerful effect, you just need to make sure that the content you are submitting is unique and high-quality. It is not the article directories that are dead, but low quality content in general.
So as you can see, link building will always have its place in ranking a website. The methods may change, but the rules remain the same, use high-quality, diversify, and don’t try to be spammy. Use these Link building tactics, and watch your website get more traffic not just from search engines but hundred more sources too.
Let me know if you find this helpful and feel free to ask whatever you want!
Image Credit: David Castillo Dominici
Great post, I use blog commenting, it proves over and over again that it’s one of the best methods for better community and business.
thanks for sharing
Hi James,
Blog commenting is a great way to get traffic and build relations with other bloggers, thanks for commenting!
All of these are extremely useful ways to build links, but more importantly, to build traffic from places other than the search engines. I learned my lesson with one niche site of mine that was hacked and lost all its Google traffic, which was my main source of traffic for that site. Now I focus more on attracting visitors from other places where my target market hangs out.
That’s not to say that I don’t still optimize my content and build links. I just focus more on the diversity and quality of links. With all the Google updates, it’s more important to spend your time figuring out where your market is and engaging them with content that will draw them to your site. The links come naturally out of that.
Well said Sharyn, we cannot rely only on one source of traffic, especially if we have no control of it, so diversity is the key for a successful site on the long run, thanks for stopping by…
I have seen blog comments work with the Comment Luv plugin. I like to reply on a comment on my blog, then click on the Comment Luv link in the commenter’s post. I go over to their blog and read their post, and comment. It works to make for return traffic.
Hi Laura,
Commentluv is one of the best plugins and commenting on blogs that use commentluv is certainly a great way to get targeted traffic, thanks for stopping by…
I completely agree with laura morris as am getting the traffic in the same way
Kostas,
Love the breakdown that you have created here. Its clear that the old days of internet marketing via black or grey hat techniques are dieing out and we as marketers need to adjust to that if we want to be successful. Having come from the blackhat IM world I can tell you that they and everyone understand that high quality content has and always will be king in the eyes of the search engines. Its our task now to provide them and our readers what they are looking for.
I only did 2 of 6 ways to build link for my blog, commenting and guest blogging. May I will try some new ways such as video marketing (I will do it if my English as good as I expect) – thank for share your great experience.