Link Building: Best Practices

Putting together an effective link-building campaign is the foundation of SEO practices. With it being such a staple of Internet marketing, it’s vital to ensure you’ve got the basics understood. So, without further ado, here is a selection of broad tips to get you on the path to establishing a base of link-building:

• Continuously try to promote high-quality and potentially viral content through social media, bookmarking sites, and internal blog posts.
• Try to focus on gaining relevant traffic as well as increasing search rankings through your linking.
• Include as much diversity as possible! Any duplicate content on your site puts it at risk of getting blacklisted by search engines.
• Use a variety of anchor texts. Constantly referring to the same couple of keywords in your linking could potentially be another ticket to the search engine blacklist. Using variety in your links helps make your site look more natural to search engines and increases your chances.
• Link deeply within your site. As well as general internal links, linking to content deeper within your site boosts link diversity and helps search engines see how rich in content your site is.
• Aim for smooth and consistent link growth. SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint; having a range of consistent long-term links will provide far more strength than a mad dash of internal link spamming.
• Choose your keywords carefully. Sometimes being the top-ranked result for a longer and less common, but still relevant, set of keywords can be far more successful than shooting for an extremely popular word. It’s good to build links around a mixture of both common and unique search terms.

While these are all great tips, some experts argue that there is no best practice and that link building is an aspect of SEO that is constantly changing and must be tackled with a constantly mixed variety of techniques. That aside, these are some general rules of thumb that will help boost search rankings. Of course, this is all very time-consuming, so taking advantage of an online marketing company is an option that many choose to reap the benefits of link building without having to give up most of the work day.