Link building should be an on going process that you are in for the long term, this isn’t something that you can just do for a month and then just forget about it. Gaining backlinks is actually quite a technical process and you should also keep in mind that they get better with age.
Let’s begin; one of the first things you should do is figure out your budget and how much time you can spend on this process. This will determine how you go about this, weather you do it yourself or you hire someone to do it for you. If you choose to go down the do it yourself path here are a few things you should start thinking about: What sites would you link to and would they link to mine?
Some great places to start finding some link love:
- Related Blogs
- .gov and .edu sites
- Sites in your niche (preferably non-competing)
- Other related sites
Another great way to find some authoritative backlinks would be to find out where your competitors are getting their links from. This is pretty easy to do using the right tools, there are a few options out there from Yahoo! Site Explorer to OpenSiteExplorer.org. If you choose to use Yahoo! it may take you some more time to figure out which are the strongest links and what text they are using, open site explorer will provide all of this information right up front making things a whole lot easier and less time consuming.
After finding the information needed you can now move on to the next step in the process contacting the sites that link to your competitors. You can also try looking up some of the linking sites in a search engine and then using the similar pages link to find more results that you could potentially get links from. These should also be good pages to get links from as they have a strong presence in your niche and related to your keywords.
Alright now that we have narrowed down the list of sites to seek links from, what’s the best way to add a link. Here it’s important to remember that webpages should not be built specifically for the search engines and high rankings, rather you should build them to be helpful and to keep your visitors happy. With that being said when adding a link you should include plenty of content to go along with it, you shouldn’t be putting together a bunch of anchor text links thinking the more links the better. In fact that will have quite the opposite effect as this will look very spammy, and chances are visitors won’t like it and the search engine spiders definitely won’t.
When you are creating content you will want to remember that unique content is very important if you want links, if this same type of content can be found on multiple sites your chances of getting links are significantly lowered. The best content would introduce a new view point or some sort of new data. Something else that may help you when you are writing content, write it first and then go back and add the links in where the keywords are and it will make the most since, you shouldn’t try to build the content around the keywords that you want to use this will most likely make it choppy and hard to read.
You should also steer away from using the “click here” method of inserting links, this is bad for SEO as well as user experience. There are a few reasons this could have a negative effect on user experience, one of them being if the visitor is trying to figure out where they were and are now navigating back through but everything looks the same with the “click here” text. It my also be frustrating for them because what’s on the other side of that link is so vague, it could be a download or something else they don’t want so they may be weary of clicking it at all.
Back to the user experience, you may want to start linking all your pages using text links to help increase your SEO, however you shouldn’t do this (unless it’s done right). If you have a text link that indicates it’s leading to more information it should be right there within that one click, your visitors shouldn’t have to click through a bunch of pages to get where they are going. If they have to this they will soon grow tired of your website and find somewhere else to get what they wanted.
This should help to get you on your way to finding better back links for your website. Just keep in mind that it’s an on going long term process and that user satisfaction is at up-most-importance. If you keep these simple things in mind and find relevant sites you should have no problems in your campaign.