SEO link building has always been the cornerstone of a successful search engine optimization strategy. Before Google introduced its Penguin penalty last year, 99.9% of every website on the 1st page of Google used backlinks in order to obtain their search engine rankings.
WHAT IS THE WRONG WAY TO BUILD SEO LINKS?
SEO link building has been defined as the process through which you obtain high-value backlinks to your site from high-ranking websites. Use your keywords within the anchor text to ensure maximum value or link love for your keywords. Links generated through advertisements, comments, article farms, and bookmarking are no longer of value – they are now open to penalty by Google’s Penguin.
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WHAT IS THE RIGHT WAY OF LINK BUILDING POST PENGUIN?
The future of SEO is more about branding, PR, and media buying. The best thing to do today is to stop depending only on Google for traffic. The best thing today is to diversify the traffic sources and make yourself penalty-proof. Here are some specific ways you can build your audience without the risk of penalties.
1. Generate Great Content, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
You’ve probably already heard this, but it’s worth repeating. Instead of creating content and pages and then making links for them, take the next step and actually create awesome content that every one would link to.
How You Can Make Your Content Awesome:
- Solve a Problem
- Answer a Question
- Teach People How to do Things
- Generate a Unique thought
2. Build Relationships to Earn Links
Building good relationships with Bloggers, Industry Experts, and Social Media professionals in your niche is a very effective tool for getting links. But it’s also a lot more time consuming than the old school way of doing things. Relationship building is something you cannot buy – so start expanding your relationship circle to journalists, experts, scientists, professionals, and startup founders. When handled well, they will work as your brand advocates…and Google will appreciate your efforts.
3. Update Your Website Design
Before you spend a ton of time trying to build relationships, make sure you have a website that doesn’t immediately turn people off.
Here are Some Ways to Update Your Design:
- Stop being “Fontastic” and start using easy to read fonts
- Update your navigation to a horizontal bar with drop drown subcategories
- Stop linking to photos on other sites – and get your own already
- Quit writing for the Search Engines and Start Writing for Your Customers
- Utilize effective Call-to-Action buttons to get viewers to do what you want them to
4. Start Guest Posting in Your Niche
Guest posting when done correctly is a great source of getting natural and genuine links to your site. Just reach out others in your ever growing circle and ask is you can do a post or podcast on a topic that is useful for both websites. Don’t forget to negotiate a link back to your website for your efforts.
5. Go Beyond Article Marketing By Doing Press Releases
Press releases are still working but we need to be smart about how to use them. They cost money, so be sure and make the content attractive and newsworthy so media outlets will publish it. And if you make it really news worthy, you might get a call from your local news affiliate to do a full story on your business or to feature you in their version of the news you release. Read about Good Private Story Names Ideas
6. Time to Get Social
Initially search engines did not give social media shares and likes as much importance as other ranking factors.
Recently things have changed and we have seen that Google and other search engines use social media signals to determine the ranking of articles and contents. In other words, if you generate some great content that gets 1,000 Tweets, there is a great chance you will see it in the Top 3 on Google. In contrast, if your readers don’t share your content, there is a great chance Google won’t see any value in it either – and thus not rank it highly for others to find.
At the end of the day we want traffic and we want leads and paying customers. What is the use of ranking high on Google if people are not buying or readers are not converting. The most important reason for you to leverage Social Media should be to get more users who will convert.
