Link Building Best Practices – A Guide to Effective Link Building Methods
Just to cover the ground, lets go over what link building is quickly. Link building is the process of building backlinks to your site. More backlinks (link form other sites to your site) a site has, higher it ranks on the search engines. Link building therefore is a mission of all money making webmasters.
Link building methods have changed form time to time and a specific method that worked yesterday may not work today anymore. This is due to changes in the industry over time and in some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.
It is therefore very important to know which link building method works today so that you can spend your time in a most productive way.
There are many link building methods out there today that work with some working better than others. Below are some of the today’s popular links building methods that work to some extent:
Article Submission
If you are reading this article, then you know that you can publish your own article in article directories. Not only do you gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus. Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading your published articles as well.
Article submission is a great way of building backlinks as it provides you with 100% relevant contextual backlinks that Google loves.
Does Google PageRank Count Anymore
Does Google PageRank Count Anymore?
Being a full-time SEM (Search Engine Marketer) I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog (not a pretty picture) to jump every time Google twitches.
Lately Google has been doing a lot of twitching. Specifically, the rather startling news from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa that Google has ditched PageRank from Webmaster Tools.
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)
Now, for SEO reasons or for ranking in Google’s index, PageRank has long been eunuchified by Google. However, even missing a few dangling bits, history has shown us, eunuchs still wheel tremendous power. PageRank is no different.
Regardless of what Google wants to happen, PageRank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web, especially if you’re selling SEO services or operating a web business. Try selling SEO services when that little green bar on your site is pointing to PR0 or worst yet, pointing to a solid gray bar
Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank. People know how to count and they learned long ago, a ten is a lot more than a big fat zero.
Placed against a PR1 site, a PR8 will win more respect in the eyes of potential clients and can produce enormous profits for the site owner and we won’t even mention the still widely practiced habit of selling links, which Google is desperately trying to stop. Total and full elimination of PageRank would be an honest start but it will still be an uphill, if not an unwinnable battle, for Google to fully eliminate link selling.
Social Media and SEO: The Wonder Twins
Social Media and SEO: The Wonder Twins
In his keynote speech for SMX Sydney, Danny Sullivan mentioned something that really resonated with me. He talked about how he sees social media marketing and SEO as reinforcing each other, like that old cartoon, the Wonder Twins where the brother and sister touched their hands together to create some awesome power to defeat the bad guys.
Yet Danny says that some of the search industry veterans have been complaining loudly about social media. “I don’t wanna be a social media marketer!”, they say. “Damn kids! It’s just not SEO.”
Yes it’s true that if you’ve been doing SEO for years, social media marketing may not come naturally. “But wake up”, Danny says. “Neither did link building! Gonna skip that? No I don’t think so. Learn social media or else work with someone who does”. I couldn’t agree more.
David Cohn complains that what he hates right now about the Internet is that “Everyone is a social media consultant. Conversation is being comodified – and people think they can become ‘experts’ in online conversations,” He says.
Well excuse me, but that’s exactly the point! The Internet has morphed yet again, enabling conversations not previously possible to flow globally. Everyone has a voice and they want to be heard, dammit! It’s not a bad thing, it’s called progress and it’s changing the way we think about business.
