Link Building Techniques That Really Work

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO. Pages with a lot of high quality incoming links tend to rank well for their chosen keywords in search engines. Building links can be a time consuming process, but the following tips should help you to get the most out of your search engine optimization work. Below are my top 3 link building techniques:

Link Building Techniques | Focus on Quality

If you spend any time on webmaster forums, or sites such as Fiverr, you’ve probably seen advertisements offering thousands (or tens of thousands) of links for a small amount of money. Those links usually come from forum profile pages, blog comments, or poorly spun blog posts on automated blog networks. From a search engine optimisation point of view, those links are almost completely worthless.
Instead of spending time and money on such low quality links, you’d be much better off looking for a few links on high quality websites that are related to your niche.

Link Building Techniques | Finding Related Websites

Persuading people to link to you can be difficult. Even if you have a useful, well organized and visually appealing website, there’s no guarantee that another site owner will link to you just because you asked him to. You may reach out to several site owners and get just one or two responses.

This is where working with an SEO agency can be useful. A good SEO agency will have already built up a list of quality sites in various niches, and will already have a relationship with a lot of those webmasters. They’re more likely to get positive responses than an individual webmaster contacting people out of the blue.

There are some techniques that you can use to earn incoming links as an individual, however. Especially if your site includes a blog.

One popular method of building links is content syndication. If you allow people to syndicate your content on their sites, in return for a backlink, then you will grow your audience quite rapidly. If you’re worried about losing visitors to the syndicating site, put a reminder to subscribe to your RSS feed in your posts, to encourage people that like your content to come directly to the source in the future.

Another good way for bloggers to build backlinks is to take part in “blog memes” and “blog carnivals”. When you join one of these events, you agree to make a post about a specific topic on a specific day of the week, and link to the other blogs that are taking part in the event at the bottom of the post. In return, the other participants will link to you. This is a good way of increasing your audience, and getting to know other bloggers in your nice. In the long term, some of them may give you one-way links, which is where the real search engine optimisation benefit would come from.

Link Building Techniques | Earning Organic Links

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to use an SEO agency to get incoming links, people would link to you freely and willingly without you or your SEO agency having to ask them.

Organic links are the best kind of links, because they have random anchor text, often link to deep pages (rather than your home page), and come from a wide range of sources. One way to get these is to offer user bars, badges, pre-defined link text (there are a lot of people that still don’t know HTML) and other tools for people that use your site. Post useful, high quality content, and let the links roll in.

Article written by Amy Fowler of SEO agency, Boom Online Marketing. For more from Amy, follow her on Twitter.

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