Summary: It’s important to ensure that…
- Your link building efforts ‘look natural’
- You vary the source of your links
- Your link building efforts are continuous
- You don’t use dodgy link building techniques
- You always know your competition
There are many factors to consider when planning and executing a link building campaign – planning the campaign, link relevance and anchor text for example.
We’ve included here a few other background factors to consider before you get started in acquiring links for your website.
Looking natural
Mentioned elsewhere in our articles, ‘looking natural’ means appearing to the search engines as if you’re building links in all legitimate ways. Of course, that may well be what you’re doing (and indeed, we hope so!). You might not have ever considered buying links, a complete no-no from our point of view. But your link profile (all the links to your website) may appear to the search engines to suggest malpractice.
A natural link building campaign will include links that aren’t the most valuable to your site – for example, links with the anchor text of your site name, your URL or even ‘click here’. Search engines will expect to see this in your campaign.
By contrast, obtaining a whole bunch of links for perfect keywords overnight is not what search engines expect to see. Even if you’ve obtained them from (say) publishing a load of articles on article sites, don’t forget that search engines work mostly on algorithms and not so much on human review. They don’t know how those links were obtained – all they ‘know’ is that they look suspicious. The key, therefore, is to build links naturally, not too many with the same anchor text at once, target a number of different keywords (different keywords for each major section of your site is a good strategy) and don’t be afraid to link now and then using your URL or site name, if you haven’t already got people linking to you this way.
Some people have queried whether this is actually important, citing that when viral content kicks off, all those hundreds and thousands of links aren’t mistaken for bought links. That’s true, but they’re unlikely to all use the same anchor text, all be from the home pages of websites, all be in someone’s ‘Links’ or ‘Sponsored Links’ section on their (often irrelevant) website, all be from similar types of sites .. the kind of patterns you see when people are buying links.
Varying the source of your links
Following on from ‘looking’ natural, it’s thought that search engines expect to see a distribution of links across different types of sources. So don’t focus your efforts on obtaining links just from article sites, just from bookmarking sites, just from social network sites, just from directories and so on. Your linking campaign needs to achieve a balance of results from a good number of sites of different types. SEO experts believe that sites who achieve a good balance are likely to be ranked higher than sites that focus too much on one type of link.
Ensure your efforts are continued
Every time you obtain a number of links, you raise the bar. Don’t think for a second that your competitors won’t meet you. Competitors have access to the same resources and information that you do, and some may employ SEO experts. That’s why link building is an ongoing process. Once you’ve achieved an initial level of success, don’t stop. Getting regular, quality links is not only ‘natural’ link building behaviour that will be favoured by the search engines, but it is also essential to stay ahead of your competition.
Keep away from dodgy link building
When you plan your link building policy, shy away from short cuts. Examples including buying links and using automated tools to submit articles and bookmark recommendations. Remember what we said about obtaining too many links at once (especially with specific anchor text!)?
Google’s game is to show its users relevant, quality content in relation to their search queries. Sites that attempt to manipulate its results damage Google’s value and reputation. Don’t think for a moment that they sit back and let this happen. Google devotes a substantial budget to tackling such practices that affect the quality of their index. In the SEO marketplace, even SEO experts who are regarded well for their knowledge of ‘black hat’ techniques (those techniques that allow them to gain an unfair advantage and which are frowned on by Google) say that they only use white hat techniques (those which Google smiles at!) with their clients, and black hat techniques are used simply as experiments on websites they don’t care for, purely in order to understand the current algorithms better.
It’s a safer bet to employ a natural link building campaign.
Know your competition
Search engines like Google look at your link profile – the sites that link to you – in context of the market that you’re trading in. So let’s say you have a super niche product that nobody’s ever heard of and there’s nothing else like it. It’s going to be much easier for you to get ranked well for key words and phrases relating to that product – there’s no competition! By contrast, if you’re selling something other people are selling, your link profile will be compared to that of your competition. So you need to be well aware of your market and what is necessary to achieve success. You need to be realistic about what can be achieved.
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