Ranking high on search engines is the goal of any website. Websites that are new or have just been revamped are seeking immediate results to be competitive. Targeting the right keywords for your customers supported by great content starts the search engine optimization process. These on-page factors only account for 25% of the page ranking process. The other 75% is the popularity of the site with links from popular sites linking to yours. It would be great to press a magic button and have the most popular sites link to yours however this is just not possible. Link building is an on-going process that takes time, especially when you are first getting the ball rolling. How do you get qualified links to your site?
10 Tips for Building Quality Links
1. Research Search Terms. In each industry there are certain terms that are used but is the target marketing using these terms? What combination of the terms are they using. There are a some great tools out there that suggest keywords and also provide information on search volume, difficulty to rank for these terms as well as where you rank within the Google Top 100.
a. . Similar to Adwords however the keyword tool provides more details for each keyword.
. Search 2 ways. Specific keywords or find keywords that are based your site’s content.
c. WordTracker. There are 2 versions, the paid and the free. I have linked to the free. This suggests keywords and provides an average daily search volume.
2. Determine when your site is crawled. This is important so that you know when to upload the new content or if you do not blog daily when the best to post the blog. This is also useful to monitor your competitors crawling dates.
In the search bar, enter your company or domain name.
Click on the cached button and this tells you the last time the site was crawled indexed.
To determine the frequency for your site, you will have to monitor this.
3. Focus on Links from Similar Sites. Receiving a link from a popular site that is similar to yours is always best as it shows credibility and that your content is extremely relevant to your industry.
4. Utilize Anchor Text. The anchor texts tells what the page is about. Use anchor text in both external links and internal links.
5. Monitor Link Reputation. Google pays a lot of attention to the links to and from your site. Too many bad links can lead to page rank penalties. See who is linking to you by typing site.yourdomaninname in the search bar. The number of links will appear on the top right side and the search results show who is linking to you. Good idea to perform this search on your competitors to see if they have valuable links you do not.
6. Write Relevant Content. It will always come back to the content as no-one wants to link to a site that is terrible or not credible.
7. Update Content Regularly. The best way is to have a blog or if you have products, update the site with new product pages.
8. Comment on Blogs. Commenting on blogs gets you noticed and eventually the blogger will link to your site – providing your comments are relevant and valuable.
9. Submit Articles. Article directories tend to have a higher page ranking. This not only gets a link but it circulates your article to new readers.
10. Directory Listings. These also have a higher page ranking and a link from some of the larger and more credible directories adds to the link building/page ranking efforts and also can separately get a page 1 ranking.
These 10 tips are just the beginning to link building. Link building takes time and lots of it. It just does not happen overnight. Certainly there are companies that offer page 1 results in 1 hour. These guys own thousands of sites and you pay them to have links. Google is on to them these should be avoided. It takes hard work to get ranked for high end keywords. Think of it this way to get a Google Page Rank of a 3, can take upwards 1-2 years. It just takes time.
What have your link building efforts included? Have any additional keyword suggestion tools to share?
photo credit: David Paul Ohmer