Good Strategies for Linkbuilding

Linkbuilding is an essential part of SEO. It is perhaps the most time consuming aspect and certainly one of the most difficult but it is nonetheless vital to your website’s success.

The key thing to remember about linkbuilding is to make sure that you are seeking links from websites or pages that are relevant to your own. If your company is concerned with fashion, a link from a travel website will not be of any benefit to either party, as it will not be considered by Google, nor will it attract any relevant traffic. Though it can be tempting to take whatever links you can get wherever you can get them, there are some strategies that it is better not to consider. Reciprocal linking guarantees you a link but demands that you provide a link to another website and is a practice generally not approved of by search engines. Using link farms, while once acceptable, will now get you penalised by Google. Likewise, purchasing links is not a practice that is popular with search engines. Fortunately, if you make sure that you are always making relevant contributions, there are places in which you can build up your links without compromising your credibility with Google. These include:

• Article marketing and submitting press releases
• Posting on relevant forums
• Commenting on relevant blogs
• The use of social media , such as Facebook and Twitter
• The use of social bookmarking websites such as Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Asking for a link from relevant websites

These can all be rather time-consuming, particularly posting on Forums, as most have a system in place designed to deter spammers, often a minimum post-count. Unless you meet that post-count by making relevant contributions, you will likely find yourself warned or banned before you can even post a link.

Equally, anyone who has attempted linkbuilding via email will tell you: you will be rejected on several occasions and ignored on many more. But sometimes, you will be given a link.

Whenever your linkbuilding is successful, there is always the possibility that the link you gain may be nofollow. In the case of Google, this does not mean that the link will not be followed, as the name suggests, but that the Google crawler has been instructed not to consider that link in terms of assigning PageRank . There is still a school of thought suggesting that a small amount of PageRank can be achieved with a nofollow link but as long as Google remains secretive about the full inner workings of their algorithm, it is impossible to know for certain. One thing that is certain, even if it does not help your search rankings in any way, a nofollow link is still one more route by which someone might arrive at your website.

If you would like help with your offsite optimisation , contact 4Ps Marketing for more information.

• No Related Post