Effective Link Building Strategies

This time it's on a topic which has always got me in a bind. I've always struggled with link building, doing only the most basic tasks and have painfully been penalized for many of them. A lot of wasted time for nothing. Pat in this post gives three very important strategies to make link building effect: link diversity, velocity and deep linking.

Link Diversity

Try to get as many diverse links as possible. These include:

• Editorial citations - a mention in a blog or article
• Resource links - a mention in a list of links in a subject matter
• Web directories - General, Niche or Local. The best being Niche Directories.
• Blog comments
• Forum discussions
• Profile pages
• Web 2.0 article directories
• Author bios
• Image links

Link Velocity

Do not put off link building in big bursts weeks apart form each other. Good link building is done in a consistent pace over time. One good way to do this is to grab the RSS feed from various blogs and feed them into a feed aggregator such as Feedly. Watch for daily posts from these blogs and leave a comment on any new ones for 10 minutes each day. If there is a big list of directories to submit to, break them into little chunks and set aside 10 minutes each day to do them. Spend 10 minutes each day participating in forums.

Deep Linking Ratio

Back linking should not be just to the homepage. A good back link strategy involves a good ratio of deep linking as well. Apart from these three strategies, the anchor text also plays a very important role. The exact match anchor text should be less than 20% of all anchor text. The majority should be branded, partial match and naked URLs. If the brand is an exact match domain, use the URL instead such as www.tinothykessler.com or TimothyKessler.com as the anchor text.

Tactical Link Building

Here are some tactics that I gather from this post which are awesome. I have never heard of these tactics and am intrigued and eager to use them.

Fail Proof Content

It is extremely important to create good content that will be very useful to your readers, and not merely articles to fill up the website. Good content will naturally get linked by readers who found it helpful. With great content, you can begin to market it in a very unique way. First, find the biggest authorities in your specific industry and feed their domains into Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer. Study all the links pointing to their domain. Using their best links, go to that linking website and look for pages that link out to a number of different websites, for example the Resource Page. Go through each of the links and see if you can find ones that have a large number of linking root domains (LRD). You can do this by feeding the URL in Open Site Explorer. If the link with the large LRD is a working page, study their best links for a common theme that you may be able to create content around and get these same links to link to you. If the link is a dead page, use the Wayback Machine to study what was the content that was on that page. You may be able to recreate the content and then get in touch with these webmasters to switch the dead link to your new article instead. Whether those webmasters will link back to your page will large depend on these reasons:

• The domain looks spammy
• The website is irrelavant to them.
• The website is too comercialized
• The content is not up to par
• They no longer update their website.

But it is still worth a try.

Broken Link Building

Go through some of the best links for a competitors website. Scan through the pages of those linked websites and see if you can find any broken links. Then email the webmaster and tell him you've stumbled on some broken links and ask if he'd like you to point them out. If he says yes, point them out to him and introduce your website or post ans ask if he'd like to mention it. These are some awesome ideas which I have never used which I am definitely gonna put into practice.