Brands’ all and sundry, have a standalone website dedicated to their business. An elucidatory domain name, a reliable web host and inspiring website design – all these are carefully addressed in their endeavor of creating an impressive online representation of their brand. But when it comes to creating an online reputation, more often than not companies fail to recognize the importance of backlinking. Even those who fully realize how a good page rank can be beneficial, are scrambling to find ways to build quality backlinks.
The following sermon lists 8 simplest and most effective ways to build links, without having to assail the web with Spam-like links:
1. Take a Cue from Competitor
Keeping an eye on the competition never fails, backlinking endeavors are no different. So, what does competitor analysis mean with respect to building backlinks? It essentially means evaluating how your client is approaching the process and in their exercise to build the links, how are they spreading their wings. It is important to know at which places are the placing the links back to their websites and it would serve you well to follow suit. Buy replicate their strategy will save you a lot of time and give you a greater insight, without having to indulge in extensive research. If you have lesser people working for you than your competitor, this practice is going to reap rich benefits.
But, even with the professionals you have working for you, do perform a research for the portals and websites on the Internet that are relevant to your website’s genre, but have been missing from your competitor’s list. By going a step ahead than your competitor, you are pitching yourself for better results.
2. Let Content Take You Through
One thing that will never fail is writing more and more content. Publishing content in high doses on your website is never going to invite any penalties from any source unless it is original and relevant to your site. Google is known to favor websites that keep on positing new content more frequently, rather than once in a while. If you can post 3 or more articles per week, you are going to get reasonable benefits in terms of the search engine indexing.
The content you post should not only be relevant, but it also has to be compelling enough to make visitors stay on your website. it is a part of building a positive reputation for your website so that the visitors talk about it among their friends and online social circles. When your content intrigues your visitors, they share it on their social media profiles, which means more and more people read it. As you build your reputation through quality content, other websites will start noticing you and will wish to link to your site too. And never ignore the SEO side of things. Whenever you are publishing a post, make absolutely certain that you use Title Tags, meta keywords, meta descriptions, etc. in order to rank higher in search engines.
3. Guest Blogging on Relevant Websites
This was probably the first suggestion you were looking for. Whilst the recent updates of the likes of Panda have suggested that Google is penalizing websites that are involved in guest posting, it would be an awfully wrong deduction to make. Google is not penalizing the practice of guest posting, it is coming down hard on the websites that have their backlinks scattered all over the Internet by the means of guest posting on even spammy sites.
There is no dearth of SEO professionals who would post the same content on 30 different websites in their quest to build backlinks. This however has only negative impact on their sites, and when you are involved in the guest posting exercise, make sure you do not spam the web. Only post content on sites that are relevant to what your website is all about and which can give you reasonably good link juice on the account of it having a quality PR. Contact the website administrators of similar blogs and write posts for them, with a link back to your site that would most probably be included in the author’s bio. Contacting reputable bloggers and authors also has benefits other than back linking.
4. Build Links through Social Media
Social media can be an essential part of your link building exercise. Get your site’s pages made on the major platforms like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, etc to get maximum traction out of social media. When you create a profile for your site on these sites, you also ensure the traffic to the site experiences a considerable spike. While social media does not offer dofollow links, the nofollow links posted on them have their own benefits. At least, you aren’t penalized by Google if you create far too many Nofollow links.
5. Web 2.0 Site – Ever Heard of it?
What’s a not so known mean to build links that are in sync with the search engine crawlers, Web 2.0 sites are those sites that are embedded with social networking components. These types of website contain Joining a web 2.0 site is an excellent method of developing search engine friendly links. If you are not familiar with the name, web 2.0 is the term used to describe websites that have a social networking component to them. Sites like Quora, Hubpages, etc. facilitate writing articles on them while including multiple backlinks to your site. These sites get some rich traffic and thus prove to be an essential source of traffic for your site as well.
Also, for the fact that they have very high page ranks, you get desirable link juice from them. All you need to ensure is that you don’t simply copy the article that already exists on your site and paste it as it is on these sites, even if they allow it. Google sees through it and all your exercise counts for nothing. Thus, it is recommended that you write fresh content for them that will be liked by their audience who can be directed to yours by the means of hyperlinks you include in the articles.
6. Commenting on Dofollow and Nofollow Websites
There are websites that offer dofollow links on their comment boxes, and there are websites that don’t want to take any risk of being spammed. However, both benefit you in their own right. While the Dofollow links will obviously help you create link juice and boost your page ranking prospects, the Nofollow comments on highly popular websites with heavy traffic can send some additional traffic to your blog as well. If you are running an entertainment blog, you may find that majority of the websites centered on entertainment articles use the Disqus commenting method, which means you are not getting any dofollow links. But, since these are popular sites, they attract many readers who might also end up clicking on a link in the comment box.
7. Article Submission Sites
Another method to get people know about your brand, without dofollow links, is writing articles for article submission sites such as ezinearticles, goarticles, sooperarticles, etc. All these websites are extremely popular and enjoy massive readership. And thereby, they hold great prospect of sending top of the funnel traffic to your site.
8. Testimonials
This is one incredibly useful approach to build backlinks. Write testimonials for your business partners and companies you have been a client of, and include the link to your website in the testimonial. When you write testimonials for websites that already enjoy a good page rank, you get to enjoy the leverage you get from there and you manage to get a good link juice as well. Write the testimonials in a way that you include the keywords and link them back to the corresponding page of your website.
Backlinking is safe unless you start overplotting and spamming the web. Follow the right approach of building backlinks and you will go a long way in influencing the search engine rankings.
About Author
Peter Milar is a prolific writer, who works for
Xicom Technologies Ltd. and brings to the table a quantum of knowledge around development, combining it with his creative writing skills.
