Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in how well your website will rank in the search engines. It ultimately will determine whether or not you get organic (non-paid) traffic to your website.
One of the key components of SEO is link building. It is a known fact the search engines look at link patterns to determine how your website and content will rank.
So, building links is extremely important. However, not all links are created equal. So, how do you start link building to get the results you want and not getting penalized or ignored by the search engines?
Free SEO Certification Course from the HubSpot Academy
5 Ways To Start Link Building
1.Don’t Overdo the Anchor Text
One of the worst things you can do when you start link building is to use the same anchor text over and over again. Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another page on your website or an external website. It usually appears as blue like this link to the free SEO Certification Course from the HubSpot Academy
This looks very suspicious to Google and other search engines. Especially if you have a website that isn’t getting very many links and then all of a sudden you get hundreds of links with the same exact anchor text.
2. Vary Link Sources And Targets
Varying your anchor text is vital to your SEO success. But, you also need to vary your link sources. Try get all different types of links from a large pool of IP addresses. An unnatural profile is one that has 5000 blog comments, and 10 links from other sites. Or, it has 60% of its links from the same IP address.
Avoid linking to your home page more than inner pages of your website. Some webmasters tend to overdo links to the home page, and ignore their inner site pages. This also looks unnatural because when people link naturally they link to articles, and inner content, not the home page. So, it is important to do some deep linking and link to various pages on your website.
Keep in mind that a link profile is liquid, it’s an overall score, not just for the home page. When you get quality links to multiple pages of your site that link juice spills all over your website and attains the general goal of SEO, which, is to gain enough trust from the search engines for the domain to rank in search engine results pages (SERPS). When your domain has trust, all the pages on your site will tend to rank high in search results.
3. Don’t Link From Bad Pages
Some people run out and get links from every possible site they can. If it is a bad page the link will be completely useless at best, and can cause penalties when obtained in high numbers at worst.
Before you place a link on any page you need to first find out if the site is indexed. Doing this is very simple. Go to Google and type in the following in the search box:
Info: SiteYouWantToLookup.com
If you get a result that means the site has been indexed by the search engine. Continue your research and find out how the page ranks. If it ranks well that is of course a good sign.
Pay close attention to how many outbound links are on the page. If there are a ton of outbound links it means you will be sharing link juice. This could mean your links won’t be worth very much.
4. Get Reciprocal Links From Authoritative Domains
Exchanging links with a website that is less authoritative than yours is a complete waste of time. If their page rank is very low it won’t do your website any good. Again, not all links are created equal. Just because you get a reciprocal link doesn’t mean it will help your website rank any better. Only exchange links with sites that have more page rank or equal to yours.
In reality, reciprocal links are an outdated method and should only be done sparingly when there are opportunities to get traffic from the other website and not just for link juice as Google typically ignores reciprocal links these days.
5. Focus On Quality Over QuantityÂ
Most people try to get as many links as they can. They are more focused on the number of links rather than the quality of the links they are getting.
You really have two options when it comes to getting links. You can spend hours and hours getting as many low quality links as you can or you can spend your time getting great links. The latter will win almost every time.
When you create great content and submit it to social media sites you get the opportunity to attract a targeted audience and good quality links. This method works much better now that the mass low quality link building days which are long gone.
Free SEO Certification Course
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to increase visibility on popular search engines such as Google and Bing. In this free SEO Certification Course from the HubSpot Academy, you’ll learn all things SEO, including website optimization, link building, keyword research, and much more.