Small Business Link Building In A Post Panda & Penguin World
The Panda and Penguin updates have made some serious changes which have
forced the webmasters to modify their strategy in order to optimize
their website. This time, content is once again king, identity and
trust is key, and webmasters might not want the kinds of links they used
to want.
The latest Google’s Panda Search algorithm which aims to promote the high
quality content site by dooming the rank of low quality content sites.
It is quite visible that search engines are getting smarter and therefore, it is essential to redefine the link building strategy. Pursuing links from low quality websites is no longer the best practice today. The idea now is that if webmasters pursue links centered on an expected referral value, they will not worry about developing spammy link profiles. This is completely logical and is not nearly disputable as it may seem. However, some people would want to clarify the new link building small businesses might perceive as a detrimental way to build links.
It is quite visible that search engines are getting smarter and therefore, it is essential to redefine the link building strategy. Pursuing links from low quality websites is no longer the best practice today. The idea now is that if webmasters pursue links centered on an expected referral value, they will not worry about developing spammy link profiles. This is completely logical and is not nearly disputable as it may seem. However, some people would want to clarify the new link building small businesses might perceive as a detrimental way to build links.
Adopt Unique Strategy…
The truth in case of link building is
that you can implement either some rarely used strategy or the wide
spread strategy, but your strategy may prove to be a golden egg for one
website whereas for another it can turn out to be rotten egg. Unless you
know the accurate steps that needs to be followed for earning links,
you would be looking for the webmaster who can sympathize with you and
can put your links on their website.
Strategies That Help You Make A Smarter Move…
In the event of the Panda and Penguin
updates, it is important to dig deep into the matter to find out the
common patterns that have contributed in the list of the rankings of
websites. There are some of the strategies that you need to keep in mind
in order to make your efforts flawless.
#1. Recognize The Relevant Links
The adoption of the shotgun approach
will not help you survive long in the market and therefore, you need to
focus on finding the link opportunities. Shotgun approach is Marketing strategy whereby (in contrast to rifle approach) the aim is to cover as wide an area or population as possible. You need to check the relevance
of the link and authority. Ask yourself if at all it is possible to build the link
from the targeted site that will make sense to the visitors. If the visitors are not there, then it’s
useless to waste your time. In essence, what the SEO collective wisdom is telling us to do is acquire links only from competitive pages, and yet linking to your competitors with anchor text relevant to their topics will only help them more than it helps you. You need to identify the feasible link opportunities before you start with your link building process.
#2. Use Balanced Anchor Text
It is important that about 40% of your
links should always represent your brand, product, domain or URL, whereas 20% of
the link should focus on the exact keywords that you are targeting. The
remaining 40% will make use of any part of the keywords that is mixed
with the brand name and other anchor text like “Click Here or Read More”. Excessive
number of backlinks with the same anchor text or continuously using the
similar anchor text may not give you the desired results. Home Page should have 40% Keyword Anchor text (and Latent Semantic Indexing) and 60% yoursitename.com, Brand name, click here, the most important backlinks to the internal pages.
#3. Avoid Buying links for Link Building
Applying any kind of strategy which can
help you achieve thousands of links in a shorter span of time may appear
to be suspicious to the Google. It is an illegal link building method if used to optimise your website.
It is clear in Google's guidelines and if you are found to be in
breach, your site could lose ranking or could even be barred from Google
altogether!
The only authentic way through which you can
expect to receive massive links in the shortest time is with the use of
viral content and it is the only way through which you can keep the
position of the website intact. Paid links might drive some traffic, but that will be always low-quality traffic compared to natural links.
#4. Analyze Your Competitor’s Links
Are you coping everything that your
competitors are doing? Competitor link analysis is much more than finding out who’s linking to your competitors and getting them to link to you. There is a huge amount of useful information you can grab if you just take the time to research carefully. But, It is
important to create your own identity and take the best from the
competitors to improvise it and implement in your strategy. You need to
take a minute to look at the link profile of your competitor in order to
get an idea. Word Tracker, SEOMoz (Open Site Explorer), Link Diagnosis & Majestic SEO
are great tools to look into you competitor’s link profile. You should think
strategically to stand out from the crowd.#5. Emphasis on Building Relationships
It is the best tactic that you can adopt
in order to find the best and relevant links for your website. It is
true of the relationships that happen in the real world. You need to
attend different conferences, seminars or meetups which can improve the
chance of finding the people of your own industry and then you can
automatically create a platform through which you can build up the
valuable network. You should focus on developing real relationships in
the initial stage, rather than concentrating on the links. It can always
be effective to keep the business cards to keep in touch with the
person.
#6. Dofollow VS Nofollow
You will come across with every website
that contains nofollow and dofollow links. There are some people around
who are highly concerned about the number of such links, but there is no
such ratio that you need to maintain on the site. When a site page gets an Dofollow inbound link, which is a hyperlink pointing to that page, the page gets a small SEO boost where as No Follow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the Search Engine Result Pages (or SERPs). If you are having these links in a proportionate
amount then you can certainly keep the spam sites far away and you will
definitely gain the higher page rank while improving the amount of
visitors to your website.#7. Branded Link
Google has its own metrics in order to
understand the quality of the link and therefore, it is essential to
have links that are branded and highly authentic. It needs to be branded
not only on the homepage, but also on other pages. These links turn out
to be highly beneficial for the website and it can certainly contribute
in the higher ranking of the page. It would be always great to have link for Tech crunch, BBC, or Wikipedia on website. #8. Directory Submission
Though, it was once considered to be an
effective way of generating traffic and ensure the presence of the
business in the market, but in the present time it has lost its
importance. Google has penalized most of the directories and so there is
no use of spending the valuable time in the process of directory
submission. However, you can still come across with some directories
that are prevalent (like Bing, dmoz, Yahoo! Directory, Google Webmaster) and
you can consider submitting the articles on the site that are of the
niche and you can expect to get a small boost in ranking.
References:
Thanks a lot for sharing these helpful strategies. One problem though, I don't think Keywords Selection is as important anymore when Hummingbird (Google's latest search engine algorithm update) arrived. You see, with Hummingbird, the results are no longer directly coupled to individual keywords, but rather to the sequence of the queries. The linking of a sequence of queries is makes it possible to determine the intent of a search query without the need for ‘caveman’ terms.
ReplyDeleteLearn more by reading the articles linked here.
Thanks a lot for sharing these helpful strategies. One problem though, I don't think Keywords Selection is as important anymore when Hummingbird (Google's latest search engine algorithm update) arrived. You see, with Hummingbird, the results are no longer directly coupled to individual keywords, but rather to the sequence of the queries. The linking of a sequence of queries is makes it possible to determine the intent of a search query without the need for ‘caveman’ terms.
ReplyDeleteLearn more by reading the articles linked here.