People who are new to the business of search engine optimization quickly learn that they need to obtain links to the pages on their website. This can be a daunting task for a newcomer. It sounds simple until you go to do it. How are you supposed to go about it? Where do you start? What kinds of links should you be trying to get? This is where many people go wrong.
By Guest Writer Thad Olszewski
Let me share some quality insight with you that you are probably having a hard time finding online. There are two ways that people can go about link building. The first and most common one is going for quantity over quality. Most people start by going after the really low quality links that are easy to obtain.
What do I mean by low quality links?
There are several ways to get a lot of links in a short time; It is easy to get links in free for all forums and blog comments. Another way to get links quickly is through article marketing and mass article submissions. Unless you really like writing, this is going to be a hard job. You might even outsource some of it, thinking that paying less than a hundred dollars for thousands of links is a good idea.
These methods will work to some degree, especially if you are in a niche that has little competition. However, if you are in a competitive industry, you are soon going to realize that relying on this form of link building is not going to get the results you really want.
Instead of focusing on low quality links or hiring an outsourced SEO firm to build thousands of them, you will likely be far better off focusing on building fewer high quality links back to your website.
What are high quality links and what how do I get them?
The kinds of links I consider to be high quality are harder to get. They would be contextual links on the pages of certain websites. Links on websites like these would apply:
- Industry research websites
- Major news websites
- High Google Page Rank websites
- University websites
- Major industry organizations
- High traffic websites in your industry
- Major corporate websites
The best place to obtain high quality links is from other sites within your industry that are considered trusted authorities or from websites that are considered large information hubs for that industry.
For instance, a website like Pandia.com would be considered a very high value website for my field of study. This website ranks high for many terms related to the industry. Plus, there are many well known industry experts who share their knowledge here. The website contains a wealth of information related to search engines and search engine marketing. This is an ideal website for someone like me to mingle with other professionals in the industry. You can tell from reading the information here that the site is valuable to people searching for this kind of information.
Ideally you would want links that are in context (contextual), like right in the middle of a paragraph. Getting one at the end of an article or being listed as a reference is also valuable. It is also very valuable to be included in a list of links so long as the other links on the list are all to high value relevant websites. Those lists have high hub scores which pass lots of authority.
In case you didn’t know this, one good relevant editorial link from a trusted top level domain can bring you more ranking juice than thousands of those low quality links. It may take you a while to figure out how to get those high quality links, but the work is worth it in the long run. Those high quality links will stand the test of time. They will keep giving you ranking juice and traffic day after day for many years. Your competitors will be discouraged because it is so much harder to get those quality links.
Where do you start? How do you find these kinds of sites?
For starters, if you know a lot about your particular market, you will already know the domain names for some of these high value sites. If you want to find other ones, here is how you could do it.
- Do a Google search for your main keywords. The sites that rank on page one are going to be some of the best possible places from which you could acquire links. Many of them will not be available as places to get links from. Just continue down the list for the first few pages, looking to see if there are any places you might be able to acquire a link from. Then repeat this process for other keywords that are closely related to your main ones.
- If you own any standard industry link analysis programs, you can study the link profile of the websites that are ranking on page one in the search results for your main keyword. Find out how and where they got their links and you will find places to get some for yourself.
- Identify a handful of top people within your industry. Using your favorite search engine, look for places where they have contributed. If you do enough digging around, you will find some opportunities. The places they have contributed to are probably valuable industry websites. You won’t find most industry experts hanging around low value websites offering their advice.
Okay – I have identified some good ones. Now how do I get them to link to me?
This is where you need to be creative. You should start by getting them to notice you in some way shape or form. There are different ways to do this. Here are two possible methods you could experiment with.
Become popular:
Maybe you can produce a piece of content that is so popular on one of the social media websites that some major industry journalists notice you. Then you might get mentioned unexpectedly in one of their articles. If you produce enough really popular content like this, you are sure to be noticed by someone. It isn’t going to happen with every piece.
Say hello:
For those people who have no idea how to produce content that becomes that popular, you could take a more practical approach. Use some good old fashioned networking skills. Introduce yourself. Hopefully you have a respectable website that showcases your quality workmanship.
Offer your help:
Find a way to create value for them. If you are helping them to create value for their property, there is a much better chance (a pretty good one actually) that they will want to reciprocate in some way. One way to do this is to send a little traffic their way or some link juice.
Be patient:
You have to give before you receive. Some people will appreciate the gesture and want to reciprocate immediately. Don’t expect immediate rewards though. Maybe this one gesture this time won’t pay you back immediately. Somewhere down the road it might, though. You should take the same approach with your website. Build real value for people.
Each situation is going to be a little different. You are going to have to spend some time to think about each one to decide the best approach to take.
It pays to get quality instead of quantity
If you have aspirations of achieving the top position in Google for even a moderately competitive keyword, then you are going to have to work on getting quality links. Too many people get hung up on whether the site uses “No Follow” links or not. This should not be your primary concern. Your primary concern should be the overall quality of the site’s content and its relevancy to what your website is about. Focus on that and you will start to find places that are well suited.
Remember that Google and the other search engines are finding new ways to devalue those really easy to get links. Every year those types of links lose more ranking power. All the while these weak links are losing power; the best links are gaining more and more juice. Get yourself the best possible quality links from the best possible sites and your work will be rewarded many times over for years to come.
photo credit: Desmond Kavanagh
Thad Olszewski owns and operates The Website Promoter service for business websites. His company helps businesses generate publicity for their websites as well as drive organic search engine traffic to them. He is the author of numerous articles including How To Get Ranked Number One on Google.
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