You can be on the first page of Google just with onsite optimization (usually for long tail keywords). When the competition becomes incredibly high you’ll need link building techniques.
An SEO audit on your website may point you in the right direction with the process of link building. Also, keeping your own personal checklist with things to be done will help you stay on track (here is mine quick SEO checklist).
Here are my 25 link building advices that I have for you. Feel free to add yours.
- Identify what websites link to your competitors
- Identify the anchor text of backlinks to your competitors. See what words appear more often
- Identify the profile of websites that link to your competitors: PR, authority, theme related
- Identify root domain diversity. If your competitor gets his links from 100 blogs hosted on WordPress or Blogpost this is not that difficult to beat since all these websites are hosted on the same root domain. It’s also a chance that lots of these website were built by your competitor just for linking
- Don’t just try and copy the footprint of your competitor. Off topic websites will not provide that much of a value (this is also true for link farms or any kid of link wheels or link scheme). Try to copy the profile pattern and identify topic related websites (not direct competitors of course – you’ll have no chance of getting backlinks from your direct competitors)
- Don’t go after sitewide links. Sitewide links are links posted in all the pages from a domain. This can do you more harm than good. Request for a link placed on a single page
- Create variation in your anchor texts
- Send link requests using a personalize e-mail account. Something like yourname@yourdomain.com will have a much higher success rate than other free email accounts
- Keep track of your backlink requests in an Excel file. See who answers, who wants to offer you a link and what does he want in return
- Consider registering your website in some quality web directories like DMOZ.
- Also consider comments, video signatures, few article submission, press releases and so on
- Aim for backlinks placed inside of body text. If the text is also relevant to your page even better
- Don’t build links just to your main page. Links pointing to your deep pages create a much more natural link profile and build authority
- Identify blogs that receive guest posts and contact them
- Identify great blogs, post comments, friend with the owner of the blog and request a guest post
- When you first think of link building, think about your business partners
- Link building is not cheap and also it will take you a long time. If you want to rank well for a keyword and all 10 websites from the first page of Google have thousands of backlinks it will be hard for you to get there. A natural linking pattern with thousands of links is not built overnight.
- Giveaways are a great way to attract links: free tools, free reports, free monthly reports, free services, free ebooks; basically everything that’s free. Consider it like an investment
- Create articles that are worth linking to: list articles or articles that sum collection of articles are easy to link to. You can first use strange titles containing keywords: usually people link to your content by using the name of the page or the main topic of the page. After you get links you can change the name of the page to something more natural
- Search for your keywords plus modifiers like “list”, “top # things”, “companies”, “links” and so on. Contact page owners and let them know that you can also be listed in those lists
- If your domain contains keywords then all your links will contain those keywords. This doesn’t means that you should go and buy a domain for every keyword you want to rank well for. Think more about the branding opportunities.
- Don’t create all your backlinks with the same anchor text, representing your keywords. If your keywords are contained in your domain and that is also the name of your website (the title of the main page) then you can be much more aggressive with having lots of anchor texts as exact match of your main page title
- Reciprocal links are not that well seen by search engines. Example of something that is not a reciprocal link: You can have Page 1 from domain A linking to Page 1 from domain B and Page 5 from domain B linking to Page 5 from domain A. It’s nothing wrong with this: I used the same numbers in pages to suggest that you should link between related pages. Reciprocal is when page 1 from domain A links to page 1 from domain B and vice versa.
- Use link building after you’ve done everything you could to optimize internally your website. There are keywords for which you can rank by only optimizing your own website (usually long tail keywords) but when competition becomes higher you’ll need link building.
- A sign that a keyword might need link building in order to rank well for is the PPC competition. If people are spending lots of money to dominate a keyword in PPC than be sure that that is a competitive keyword and the same people are also doing a lot to optimize for that keyword (both onsite as well offsite)
BONUS: Be patient and build links at a constant pace.
What do you have to add to this list? What other link building tips do you think you can share with us? Post your suggestions and questions down in comments or send me an e-mail.
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