If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you probably have heard the phrase “incoming link.” An incoming link is a link that is coming from another site to yours. An outgoing link is a link that goes from your site to another site. Together, incoming and outgoing links make up an SEO strategy known as link building.
However, like all other SEO strategies, there is an art to the proper link building strategies.
Links built the right way can increase your Google rankings exponentially, while links built the wrong way can actually hurt your site. Gone are the days when you could just throw up a bunch of junk articles and spam comments with links in them and expect to get traffic. Today, link building takes a focused, concentrated effort. This article will take you through the basics of link building so you can see for yourself what works and what doesn’t.
Content is still king
You may have heard this phrase before: “Content is King”. What that means is that great content will always rise above mediocre content. There’s a lot of content online but, more and more, much of the content you come across on the web is actually electronically spun content from other people’s content or just flat out duplicates. Neither of these tricks will yield you good content. Great content is not forced or mindlessly manufactured. To be effective content needs to come from a place of passion. You don’t necessarily have to love your subject, but you should feel something about it. Passion implies something that you feel very strongly about, even if that feeling is hate. Many political blogs are very successful because they hate the people they’re writing about. If you write a well-written informational article that is keyword optimized, your article will almost always attract attention.
Make friends with an expert
If your site is still in its early stages, you’re not considered an expert, even if you are one. The best way to be seen as an expert is to make friends with an already established expert. Find out who these people are in your niche. Go to their blogs and make relevant and insightful comments. While it’s true, spam commenting is dead. Relevant insightful comments are still a great way to introduce yourself to an expert and join in on a conversation. You can leave your link unobtrusively on their page without making it seem like that was your purpose the whole time. This may or may not help you with the search engines, but the expert might follow this link and decide he likes what he sees and actually contact you or put a link from his website to yours.
Make it easy to share
Search engines love social media, and so do people. If you want your article to be widely linked to, then you want to make it easy for people to share it with all their friends. Having social sharing buttons in prominent places does this. These buttons allow users share your content with their social networks. Making your site easy to share will help to get talked about and linked to more often.
There are many ways to build links; however, three of the most popular include having great content, making your great content easy to share, and making friends with an expert. While these sorts of link building techniques do take time, the results pay for themselves and will last longer than any sort of quick fix link building.
Adam Chronister is co-founder of Enleaf, an award winning Web Design and Internet Marketing Firm. You can find him on Facebook Facebook and Twitter.