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Probably no area of search marketing is more filled with controversy, scams,
pitfalls, and nonsense, than the area of link building. It is indeed a minefield
for the website owner. Because it is
the cornerstone of how Google builds its search engine rankings, it is a vital
topic. But it need not cause you to lose sleep. Here we will endeavor to calm
your nerves, and give you some basic hints about building links to your website.
Link Building – A List of Don’ts.
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Do not join a link exchange farm, scheme, club, ring, consortium, syndicate
or fellowship. No matter what they say or what they call it, any scheme that
automatically gives you tons of links (and requires you to link back) will
damage your site in the search rankings, sooner or later. As you
can tell from Google’s stock price, they are far from dumb. Links are
the cornerstone of the Google ranking system. Try to abuse it (through link
schemes) and they will eventually catch up with you. And when they do, your
site will be penalized by lower rankings (and possibly dropped from the Google
index entirely). Same goes for the other big two search engines, Yahoo! and
MSN.
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Do not believe you can get something for nothing in the area of links.
If it sounds to good to be true, it certainly is, and it means you are about
to get scammed. For details, see our
post on internet scams.
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Do not try to build your entire links campaign based on reciprocal (or
exchanged) links. Here we are talking about the usual method of asking for
a link exchange – you find a site you want a link from (you make sure
it is relevant to your site) and you offer a link exchange. A handful of
these are ok. Maybe 20% of your total links, in fact. But don’t make
all your links reciprocal links. Remember that they are of increasingly less
value. And do not spam webmasters by using software programs to shoot out
thousands of emails at once. These programs are great for organizing your
links campaign. But when you ask for a link, do it one link at a time.
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Don’t get too heavy into paid text link ads. Again, a few are ok.
But check out the vendor very thoroughly. Know where your ads will appear.
And keep it to a small portion of your total campaign, because we know the
big search engines are beginning to weight them less than before.
Link Building – A List of Do’s.
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Do build a great site, and keep giving your site visitors something of
value to come back for. At the end of the day, this is what will build you
a great inventory of in-bound links. You want other sites to link to you
naturally. These are the one-way links that the search engines will reward.
And if your site is not offering anything of value to visitors – change
it! Otherwise, don’t expect good links and good traffic.
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Do throw a little “link bait” on your site. “Link bait” is
anything on your site (or in your online marketing) that attracts links.
We know of an antiques website that placed some original educational material
on their site, to get links from .edu’s. It worked. That’s link
bait. The list of things that can serve as link bait is endless. Your job,
as business owner or website owner, is to get creative with this one.
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Do place your website in good directories, especially to jump start a new
site. But don’t get carried away with it. It only goes so far.
The
Internet Search Engine Database is a great resource for directories. So is this list at
WeBuildPages.com. Another source is
Best Web Directories.
And subscribe to The Link Spiel Blog to stay on top of this area.
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Do get your website’s name out by doing some online promotion. You
can use services such as PRWeb or
Go Articles
to publish your PR piece, and you can include in it a link back to your site.
So when your article gets republished on another site, you get a link back.
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And don’t forget to ask for links from websites maintained by trade
associations, vendors, suppliers, alumni associations, chamber of commerce,
local library, and so forth. The list can go on. Be creative, and just ask.
Building good links is like putting money in the bank.
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Link Building