What Is Link Building In 2015?
Good day! Let's talk about what is link building nowadays, what with Google Penguin seeming to roll out non-stop and crushing sites left and right!
Link building is the process of attracting other websites with your great content to get those sites to link back to one of your pages.
And why do we care about building links? Because links from other sites pointing back to ours indicates the relevancy and authority of our site, that's why. And that translates into ranking better in search results.
Sounds really simple, doesn't it? If only it were!
Since Google unleashed the Penguin spam penalty upon the internet landscape back in April 2012, link building for the honest webmaster has gotten much harder, with a higher level of effort in building high quality pages and seeking like-minded sites to put text links back to ours with anchor text that passes the Penguin sniff test. Complicating matters are those web owners out there who confusedly think Google banned all link building, and will rebuff any requests made for putting links on their sites to others.
What Is Link Building Now?
Now you have to play it safe with link building. Claiming, verifying and optimizing your local business directory listings is the safest bet of all. These are the legitimate business listings such as:
- Google My Business
- Bing Business
- Yahoo! Business
- Merchant Circle
- Manta
- Super Pages
- Yellow Pages
- Localeze
- Best of the Web
- Foursquare
There are many, many more, but these are good ones to start with. Other reputable, relevant, authoritative links back to your site are the ones from the business networking groups you join, such as the local chambers of commerce, Meetup, etc.
But what are other good linking buddies you can work with? Any business that's related to what you offer is a good link partner. If you are a real estate agent or broker, you're lucky - you have TONS of link partners like:
- Mortgage lenders
- Settlement companies
- Home staging consultants
- Remodeling/reconstruction companies
- Landscaping service providers
- House painters
- Handyman services
Your social media platforms where you further distribute your content are also good links to have as part of what we SEOers lovingly call your inbound back link profile, or "natural" link profile.
So far, all I've talked about are "external" links - those links from other sites (other domains) that link back to you. But let's not forget that your "internal" links - the links within your own pages that connect to each other - are just as important. Why? Because you want to drive your web visitors to all of your most important pages, the products and services you offer - your money making pages.
And while we're talking about link building and anchor text, let's talk about creating Google Penguin-safe and friendly anchor text. But first a short summary of Penguin:
One of the big penalties Penguin dishes out is punishing sites that have many, many, many text links containing the same keyword phrase, or a slight variant, over and over and over again. It's basically keyword stuffing in text links. So what can you offer as safe anchor text? Here are four ways you can now write anchor text and be reasonably safe:
- Branded anchor text - your business or company name
- Naked URLs - for example, www.purplewidgets.com
- Universal, or generic - click here, read this, contact us, etc.
- Hybrid-branded - a combination of a keyword phrase and your branding: SEO training with Invenio SEO
Notice the last one is the only with any mention of keyword phrases. Google is that serious about de-emphasizing keyword-rich anchor text.
This is a really short introduction to safe link building. If you want to learn more about link building safely and other white hat SEO practices, let Invenio SEO teach you basic or advanced SEO.
Here's another post on link building strategies that shows you safe ways to build more authority for your web site.
Would you rather learn SEO at your own pace online? We offer online training for SEO.
Until next time, keep it safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of www.webmechanix.com
