Link Building Tips – Part 1

  • Create well thought out title (anchor texts) and descriptions for your link building campaigns. The title should be written such that it not only accommodates multiple variations of your prominent keyword phrases, but should also be a provocative sales message encouraging users to click. This will improve your search engine rankings for multiple keyword phrases and also get you direct traffic.
  • Try to distribute the incoming links all over your website instead of concentrating only on the home page. This is known as Deep Linking. This is beneficial because it tells the search engines that you have rich content on your website. But if you have all the links coming to your home page only, it tells the search engines that you have a shallow site with little importance and the links have been created using automation, rather than gradually by the value of your own site content.
  • Most search engines consider http://www.yourwebsitesite.com & http://yourwebsitesite.com (without the www) as two different pages. Use the ‘www’ version in hyper-linking all your internal links as well as for securing incoming external links. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to specify your preferred domain format.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of even low PR websites directing traffic to your website over time. The website with a PR2 today could be tomorrow’s PR5 site, and vice versa. Analyze the website for content relevance and features to predict its future performance to make any decision. Also keep in mind that PR data is updated every 6 months so what you see it today may not be the site’s true PR value.
  • Before approaching someone for a link to your website, you should take great care to select the appropriate page for linking. The selection should be on the base of which page will pass the maximum value to your website. Ideally it should be the most relevant page to your website with the highest back links.
  • Google’s primary motto has always been to help its users find information they are looking for and hence it gives extra weightage to .edu, .gov and .org links. Links from such sites are considered best in the business and at the same time are relatively hard to acquire. The best way to approach for such links is by offering help to organizations to build their websites, writing professional articles that professors can recommend to their students and making donations in your website business’s name or volunteering at charitable events.
  • Make sure that you use supporting words, synonyms, and surrounding text. While doing the internal linking or external linking of your website, you must allow for minimum 20% topic drift while avoiding the use of exactly same anchor text every time. Using same anchor text for internal and external linking will make your website link pattern look ‘unnatural’ or ‘contrived’.
  • If your website is link worthy within your industry, you may want to use PPC for link building. With PPC, relevant traffic will come to your website, and regardless of the channel, if they like your website, they will link to you. If you manage things well, this ploy will prove to be much more economical and natural than a conventional link building method.
  • Make sure that you don’t have any grammatical or spelling mistake on your website, especially if you want industry leaders and authoritative people like librarians to link to your site. This is where having a quality content writer will pay, as committing such mistakes will deprive you from fetching some otherwise possible 5 star links.
  • Comment on other blogs with a signature link to the most relevant page of your website. Although this will not provide you any direct Search Engine benefit, but you will get a portion of the traffic from these blogs diverted to your website and if they like your website, they might link to your website too. Just make sure that the comment is actually useful otherwise you might get banned.