Some free link building tips to market your website (for beginners) in a way that won’t get your site into trouble with Google and will help your rankings improve and should deliver very targeted traffic. I’ve also re-published some linkbuilding tips from the Hobo SEO Blog archives that are still valid.
A Basic Quick Linkbuilding Intro
- If a low quality 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!
- You should try to get your website into the good ‘neighbourhoods’ of your industry. 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. Don’t worry too much about “theme” of websites linking to you though – as this is well, a bit, unproven. Good for traffic though!
- See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or ask to have those links replaced with yours) Use Majestic SEO to see how your competitors get their links. Remember – you don’t need the same links as your competitors
- Join Social Networks, not for the links themselves, but to get your content noticed so real sites link to you!
- 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 (may negate the value of the link ) 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.Be careful when linkbuilding in 2012 – negative seo is a real thing. - 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 Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar Pagerank is out of date.
- 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. Naturally, you should also get relevant sites to link to you. Again though, this is a bit unproven – and hard to prove! Good for user satisfaction though – and making friends with other webmasters!
- Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from (although it manly is!) 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. How you link out most surely helps Google classify your site in other ways. 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 just quantity. If I was to sum it up, i’d say – get links from real sites.
I’ve got some articles that might illustrate how to get links, and how to make links, but in a responsible way. I’m not about to give other sites headaches with ‘spammers’ because in the end, the more people know about certain links, the faster their worth evaporates, and the site in question becomes a spam-fest.
Some Quick Linkbuilding Strategies & Opinion
- Should You Buy Links To Improve Rankings In Google? Short answer – it’s against Google TOS – so watch out!
- Link Building Is Easy When You Have Content Worth Linking To It’s all about content these days – on your sites and others!
- Link Pages Suck! Think smarter, when possible
- Stop Building Crap Links Content! Content! Content! Don’t build links to crap sites
- Tell The World About Your Site But Dont Ask For Links Read between the lines when Google gives advice about linkbuilding!
- Get Quality Back Links The Top Competition Has A simple strategy to get decent links the competition has already
- How I Got 500 Real Backlinks Quickly A quick tip illustrating a strategy I used.
- Reciprocal Links – Good Or Bad – One way links might be better, but reciprocal linking between websites is often natural
- Links From Unrelated Sites aren’t All Bad
- Getting Links From Directories – pretty low quality if you ask me
- Do Article Submissions & Press Releases Still Work? Depends largely where you submit to….
- Links That Effect Ranking Change In Google SERPS A list of the type of links you should be aiming for….
- Online Press Release Advice For Your Business – V Cool if you can get them syndicated to Google News
- Ranking No1 In Google For Various Terms
- Get Links From REAL Sites (IE Sites That are not Just THERE To link to other sites)
- What Is The Best Linking Strategy? It’s…..
Reminder: I’ve also had to be careful obviously – the more people know about actually WHERE to get quality links, the less value they quickly become!
