Good search engine optimizers (SEO´s) understand the importance of building a network of incoming links to their page in order to improve ranking results in the major search engines,5 Tips for Successful Link Building by Carlos Marruffo Articles but in their scuffle to push their web pages to the top, some of them are forgetting the old adage “work smarter, not harder” and they end up wasting countless hours getting links that do little – if anything at all – to help.
Here are five shortcuts that will help anyone engaged in a link building campaign to get better results, faster.
1) Remember The “Link Building Exponential”
Google has many ways of telling when a webmaster is creating an artificial network of links to a page, but savvy SEO´s will avoid trouble by considering the “link building exponential”. This is a measurement based on the premise that incoming links to a page should increase more or less at the same rate as the popularity of the page. In other words, adding too many links too fast to a page that does not seem to merit them blow-up in your face. Avoid this setback by taking your time and get quality links.
2) Get Links From Pages That Are Closely Related To Your Own
My experience has shown me that some of the most valuable links you can possibly get are from web pages that use not only the same key words that you do, but which have links from the same pages that link to you. Get links from these “perfectly related” pages and the effect on your rankings will seem almost magical.
3) Identify Directories That Are Relevant To The Content Of Your Page
There must be tens of thousands of directories on the web and that number will only continue to grow. Some SEO´s waste their time by registering their web page in any directory that will accept the listing, but I have found that it is worth spending the extra time to register the directories that have a direct relationship to the web page I am trying to place. I do not get as many links, but the links I do get have a much stronger effect on my rankings.
Finding the directories that are a good fit for the page you want to place is easy if you use two of Google´s operators: INURL and INTITLE.
Say, for example, that you are trying to position a web site dedicated to graphic design, logically you would want to find all the directories that have a “Graphic Design” category and see them ordered by relevancy:
INURL: “phrase” – returns all of the pages that contain “phrase” within its URL.
The search in Google would be:
INURL: “web design” + “add url”, or, INURL: “web design” “add url”, or, INURL: “web design” + “add your site”
Another option to find directories relevant to your web page is to use the operator “INTITLE” which shows all the pages that have the keywords in the title.
In this case the search would be:
INTITLE. “phrase” , which returns all the pages that contain “phrase” in its title.
The search in Google would be:
INTITLE: “directory” + web design
These simple steps can save countless hours in finding the right directories, and the links you can build from these focused sources will give your page more weight.
4) Position For Certain Regions Or Countries
Google determines the location of a page by the extension of its domain (ex. .uk, .es, .com.ar, etc). In the case that the domain has a generic suffix, (such as .com, .biz, .net, .org, etc.), Google will assume that the country of origin is the same as the country where the page is being hosted.
Depending on the content of the page I am working on, I will sometimes want to position the page in international AND country specific search hidden wiki engines. If this sounds like a strategy that would help you, simply concentrate your efforts on obtaining links from pages and directories which, in the eyes of Google, “reside” in the country you want to target.
5) Vary Your Anchor Text
Too many SEO´s use only their main keywords in the anchor text that links to their page. I have found this to be bad practice, since search engines interpret these links to be “unnatural” when they find too many of them.
Get around this by switching the order of the key words in your anchor text to create new variations. For example, say you want to build links to a web page that specializes in link building, your anchor texts could read: “link building service”; “cheap link building”; “effective link building”, or “link building company”. Get 500 links using these four different descriptors, and you will get more than twice the effect as 1000 links using only “link building”. This strategy has worked for me, and it should work for you, too.