Natural Link Building Top 20 Tips
- 2nd Apr 2008
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- SEO
With all this talk of link buying and how it can effectively cause your much valued website to drop out of the serps altogether, maybe it’s time to review your methods of acquiring links and for us to discuss the steps to take in find good websites to link to that add value to your own site.
Sifting through the many sites out there is without doubt a laborious process and requires time and dedication. A good link builder needs to take into account a multitude of considerations, mainly how the acquired link will affect the website not only now but in the future too.
Lets make a list of tips for link building. I’ll start the ball rolling, by the end of comments I will compile the top 20 tips so you too can become a professional link builder.
1) Check out backlinks to your competitors website, make a list of these links and by the time you have researched a number of sites you should start to see a pattern emerging.
2) When negotiating links, think very carefully as to the angle you will approach the webmaster with. OK, that link may benefit you, but what does he/she get in return ?
3) What methods will you employ to make sure the links remain on your chosen site ?
4) ( I always struggle with this one) Determine if the site is a good linking partner. What’s the nature of the site? What impact will it have on your site if you link to it ? Who owns the site ? ( Some people such as Dave get a gut feeling about a site, but here we need to establish a definite method for filtering out the crap)
24 Comments | Leave a comment »
Thanks for the advice. I’ve developed an aikido web site and I’ve researched the top 25 websites for the term aikido. I now have links from some of the highest ranking websites, for the term aikido.
Once you have a list of sites you want to have links from, never (NEVER!) send out a bulk email where you just insert the name/url etc. Make each one unique and natural (not selly-selly) sounding. Also, there’s always the chance you’ll miss one or two and forget to change the name/url or something if you go the bulk route, and that just looks bad.
Find footprints of dofollow blogs / sites that allow link submissions amass a list for link dropping.
Great start guys thanks, keep them coming !
Start a competition - best sites in particular niche. Display the best sites as voted by your readers. Contact the winners, provide a link to the results page on your site, provide some html for them to display a ‘won best in category’ with a link back to your ‘winners’ page.
Optionally provide a dynamic voting image similar to digg.
My 5 Cents: Resarch the links that you have on other sites. Push the Pages that have already links to you with new Links. Indirectly linkbuilding!
[…] Natural Link Building Top 20 Tips, David Naylor […]
Thank you for the list of tips for link building.
[…] pay for some quality links, but check at Daves to make sure the are […]
Forget PR…or at least don’t pay too much attention to it. Check out the backlinks of the backlinks instead…
I highly recommend using something like “backlinkanalyzer” to compare the top 3 sites in your niche to see who’s linking back to them and approaching as many as possible. Some you will be unable to contact/obtain because they are suppliers/clients of the other site but you’ll be amazed how many other links can be obtained.
this is so useful! give us some more, pls.. =)
When looking at competitors consider that just because they do the same thing doesn’t mean they’re your online competition. A lot of direct competitors do a terrible job of ranking for long tail terms. Do the keyword research, find the sites that rank for those regardless of obvious competition and then rinse and repeat #1 for them.
Remember it is about quality not quantity. Using an automated tool to submit to 100,000 search engines/directories may sound impressive but is likely to do more harm than good. Concentrate your efforts on highly relevant sites that may take some time but will yield better results.
Find leading e-zines or blogs in your niche and contact them about writing a guest article in exchange for a footer. Make the article especially informative then ask if they mind allowing you to do it again.
Thanks guys, keep it rolling..
To Dan’s second point above, offer an incentive to people to link back to your site. Start an affiliate scheme. We are currently planning to launch a scheme where partner sites will advertise from 1 to 10 french properties for sale (where each is a link). We will offer a partner 5% commision if we convert an enquiry that originates from their site.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned article submission. I consider this one of the most powerful natural link building strategies and should be used in any seo project if possible.
Don’t be afraid to buy links from websites and directories if you have to - just make sure that a) they are not site wide and b) that the site is not actively touting links as a method to get round the SE’s. Also don’t go PR chasing ;-)
[…] This article is a great piece for two reasons: […]
Create good content that people want to reference, this blog is a perfect working example. Oh and by the way Dave or Dan can I write a guest post for you … :)
Hi
Hope that this is an appropropriate category to post to
Do generic domain keywords have an advantage in search engines ranking when the content is relevant / unique.
I ask this question as it was my rational in 1999 to register groups of generic domains in clusters rather than one off registrations, These registrations are dormant whilst I waited for broadband to become available throughout Europe and for the European online markets to evolve
It seem to me that the generic domains as a group would be more powerful when each can offer unique content with the ability to support each others SEO, with the ultimate purpose to support a new brand name without high long term marketing costs
The domains are TLD’s in a European language .com’s equivalent to the English terms insurance, motorcycleinsurance, carinsurance, houseinsurance, lifeinsurance, carsales, carprice, carmagazine…………………………………all initially registered to enter the online insurance markets
I know that the direct link to the generic url is only a small part of the SEO but is it still an advantage to have the generic keyword registration apart from possible type in traffic?
If it is your view that it is just a bunch of domains then so be it, I will then know that the direct link in linguistic search or the coming spoken search terms have moved on
Post contributions to relevant forums. Put your website URL and blurb in your signature file. Every post you make in the forum will earn you a back-link to your site.
I agree it would be great if a site has a very unique and relevant content.by having this search engines would crawl on it and can view it as a very relevant site.