Search & Social Media Marketing Training
Digital marketing course from the University of Salford
Well, compiling effective link building strategies is just one area of what can only be described as a minefield when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. PJ Web Solutions are a company for whom I currently work. Whilst they have always known how important link building is, PJ Web Solutions are only now attempting to become more proactive in their approach rather than being reactive and look for a source of information that separates the "wood from the trees" when looking to develop an effective link building strategy. It is for this reason why this blog post was born, it will separate the mindless array of junk that is posted on various websites and spam emails detailing ways of building links and will focus on what I regard as the ‘Top 5 effective link building strategies .
5) Effective Link Building Strategy : Internal Links
When a lot of people think of link building strategies they tend to always think about links that link back to their website. Which is fine, however it is integral that the way your own website links to other pages within your site, are structured logically and create content silo’s which ensures that new pages you create are crawled by Google and indexed correctly.
4) Effective Link Building Strategy : Manual Link Submission
Manual link submission is important when developing an effective link building strategy, especially, if you can use non-financial methods of persuasion. It involves manually navigating to relevant websites in your industry and finding a point of contact to request a link to your website. A good starting point is to search for your targeted terms and choose non-competitive websites to request a link from.
3) Effective Link Building Strategy : SEO Directories
Mindlessly submitting your website to as many directories is not a good element of an effective link building strategy and it can be argued that it could even have harmful effects on search rankings. Unfortunately, I am very much in agreement with the idea that if the directory is free then it is not likely to be worth submitting your website to. There are, however, directories worth submitting your site to such as Yahoo and Dmoz.
2) Effective Link Building Strategy : Linkbait and Viral Campaigns
Viral content, if done properly, can be a powerhouse in creating an effective link building strategy. It attracts links by other sites referencing the piece of code which provides the back links to your website. For example free code such as calendars etc that people like to embed on their websites can create links back to you! Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc increase the effectiveness of link viral campaigns, as if people like the piece it will be ‘retweeted’ ‘liked’ and discussed gaining more and more exposure.
1) Effective Link Building Strategy : Content
My opinion is that whilst there is no doubt there are many ways to attract links to your site, some free, others paid for, the most effective way of building links is to prepare good, relevant content that people want to read. Content is king and if written well, it will appear on sites such as Digg, it will be retweeted and cause discussions amongst communities and social media channels. If content is written regularly and well, you can build a kind of social empire that people talk about and look forward to reading. Good ways of generating discussion could be, being slightly controversial, or playing devil’s advocate about a topic in your industry.
Always remember that building an effective link strategy takes time and is very much an ongoing process. If you dedicate the time to do things right there is no doubt you can succeed. Make link building fun, enjoy what you’re writing about and rather than it being a marketing chore, you can enjoy building links and driving your site up the search engine results page rankings (SERPS)!
Tags: seo, seo 101, seo for all, seo for beginners, SEO Manchester, SEO training, twitter, youtube
Posted in search, search engine marketing, seo
5 thoughts on “What are your five most effective link building strategies?”
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Good strategies here – all completely common sense. There is a growing view though that SEO as we used to know it is dying. Which means that your strategies #3 and #4 are also of less and less value as time goes on.
2012 has seen a massive purging of Google SERPS of content-thin websites and creating quality content is now of more importance than ever, especially as search moves into social.
Its a nice post and nice to see universities jumping onto the ins and out of online marketing, however it screams to me that this post is purely designed to link to the company at the top…
Indeed a great link building strategy, but it should be noted that employing the techniques beyond points 1 and 2 are in direct breach of the google webmaster guidelines, so look before you leap as if you get caught link building your site will, repeat will be ripped from search engines completely and forever.
see here
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
Interesting response iDCx – just for information,this website is for the search and social media marketing CPD course at the University of Salford and everyone that attends the course has to write a blog post. This is one of those examples, so this post isn’t purely designed to link to the company at the top, but this is a totally legitimate opportunity for people on our course to tell people about and link to the things they do. I note also, you have included a link to your own website. Personally, I don’t think anything above is particuarly in breach of the guidelines you mention or indeed the type of strategies listed on your own website. An interesting debate though, thank you for contributing to it.
very informative thanks a lot for sharing. can we consider link wheel as an effective link building strategy?
The points you raise are all valid. I think there is a lot more that could be included, but as the title suggests, this is simply your top 5.
In terms of being caught link building, let’s face it anybody involved in SEO is doing something unnatural but trying to appear natural. This is how you can tell a good SEO from a bad one. Google wants us to create pages etc as though the search engine position was not important. The reality is that we get paid to improve these c.f. very positions. So I say, create shareable content, build quality links to it to encourage others to see it and then share it, and above all stay away from poor quality and spam!