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March 22nd, 2010 by Susie
Link building is one of those SEO areas where the line between the black hat and the white hat methods is especially clear. It’s also a place where the ethical white hat strategy wins hands down every time. Unethical link building strategies may have worked for a while, but they certainly don’t now.
Not every one is aware of that, though. Black hat SEO companies still try and sell thousands of incoming links to anyone who’ll pay. For someone with a limited understanding of search engine optimization it might look quite attractive, because at first glance incoming links are good, right? The poor client hands over their money and gets a lot of cheap inbound links in return, not knowing they’re about to be blacklisted by Google for unethical practices.
For brand new websites, the first stop for a link building service will be directory submissions. Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ are the two most important, although inclusion in the latter is by no means a foregone conclusion, so it pays to make sure site content is up to scratch before submitting a request for inclusion. Getting a DMOZ listing can take months, but it’s a big SEO prize and well worth trying for. After the big two, there are plenty of smaller directories, especially local or industry specific ones. Be sure before submitting that the directory is recognised and indexed by Google and that standards are generally decent- it’s a ‘friendly’ directory.
The next link building strategy is one of the best SEO tools around. Social media marketing is a great way of generating inbound links with good authority and increasing direct traffic to your site. It does take some time and effort, but potential returns are extremely high and after your site gains a certain presence on social media sites the process will run itself. SMM is the centrepieces on the SEO table at the moment.
A complete SMM link building strategy will take in Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and forums and hubs related to the site in question, as well other social networking and social bookmarking sites. You can do some on page SEO too. Encouraging visitors to give your site the thumbs up on Digg is a great idea. Provide a link straight in to the service, which makes it easy and quick to do, and also puts the thought the user’s head in the first place. Mentions in other people’s blogs and your own externally hosted articles can also help. Link building strategies should make the best of every social media opportunity.
There’s also link baiting to consider. That’s the creation of site content that people will want to link to because it’s relevant and useful to them and the users of their own site. It should be part of every content creation plan and part of your SEO plan.
SEO generally includes two type of methods, one is on-page optimization and the second one is off-page optimization and that’s what assumes as link building. Search engines don’t like unethical links. Nice and informative post. Keep posting.