10 Super Smart Link Building Strategies

Tired of trying to build links the same old way? Here are some great tips to get you started on thinking out of the box in order to grab some precious links to your website:

1. Conduct a link audit. In order to figure out what's working with your link profile and what's not, it's often helpful to find out what your current link profile looks like. Plus, if you find lots of spammy links with their claws in your website, you can take this opportunity to remove them. Learn how to conduct a link audit here.
2. Create a page of resources. You can attract attention from websites you're interested in by adding them to a list of useful resources for your clients. Not only will your clients love that you're helping them out, but the sites you're linking to will see visits from your websites in their Analytics account and take notice. For example, you might create a list of the "Top Ten Dog Training Resources" or the "Top 15 Cooking Blogs."
3. Interview an industry expert. This is a great way to create linkbait - if you ask the right questions, people in your industry will definitely be curious to hear what this leader has to say. Post the interview on your website and share on social media.
4. Write a testimonial for a product your company uses. Submit the testimonial to the company - if it's published, you can make sure that your company website is linked where your name is mentioned.
5. Sign up for HARO. Help a Reporter Out is a website that helps connect reporters and sources. Patrol their emails daily and respond to any call for a source that fits in with your industry.
6. Donate to charities and nonprofits. You don't have to shell out the big bucks - donate $50 or $100 and ask for a link on their donators page.
7. Capitalize on local SEO. Make sure that your company is listed in Google Places and on Yelp. This way, it's easy for customers to find you and post reviews.
8. Submit articles and blog posts to syndication sites.  Make sure to include links wherever relevant. A good place to start is HubPages.
9. Take advantage of Google+ authorship. Yes, you can get your picture and G+ profile in the search results, and boost your SEO while you're at it. Find out how.
10. Use your Twitter profile for LinkBuilding. That's right - you can use your Twitter profile to build some juicy links. Learn more about that here.

Happy link hunting! 

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents: Top 5 Link Building Tips for 2013

It's a new year, and with that comes new changes in the online marketing landscape. Where did 2012 take us, and where are we headed in 2013? With recent updates in search engine algorithms, and Google’s now famous (or infamous) Penguin update, the link building landscape changed vastly in 2012. So how can you be sure that you're up to date on all the latest link building techniques for your website to stay relevant? Join Margie Schneider, VP of Operations at Ten Golden Rules, as she presents this intuitive presentation on link building. 

Join the webinar to learn the most effective link building tactics for 2013: 

- What are the healthiest links and how to get them

- The most important link building tactic you should be doing

- What to do about “bad” links pointing to your website

Click here to register for FREE (1-9-13 at 12:30pm EST)
http://bit.ly/Tx9a4H
About Margie Schneider: 

Margie Schneider has been involved with the interactive medium since 1994. She has participated in everything the Internet has to offer: developing, designing and delivering web sites; online advertising and promotion; search engine marketing: SEO and PPC and community and electronic communication. Her specialties include: social media, search engine optimization SEO, PPC management, online reputation management, project management, personnel management, strategizing web development and design solutions; as well as experience marketing across all media types.Click here to register for FREE (1-9-13 at 12:30pm EST)
http://bit.ly/Tx9a4H

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Leading SEO Strategies and Tactics

This Wednesday Webinar, presented by Jay Berkowitz, CEO of TenGoldenRules.com, will provide Ten Leading Strategies and Tactics for Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

This webinar will cover how to read the minds of prospective consumers, how to use tools to measure how Google reads your site, website build best practices for SEO , keyword research, link building, meta tags and the new Google Panda update.

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, September 28, 2011 from 12:30pm EDT – 1:30pm EDT. To register and for more information please visit: Ten Leading SEO Strategies and Tactics

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website Part 2

Join Margie Schneider, VP Operations of TenGoldenRules.com and Susan Cruz of the SEO team as they present Part 2 of “Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website.”

This presentation will explain the following topics:

- Strategies including .edu linkbuilding and co-citation
- Why it is important to build strategic links
- The importance of building links to directories

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, June 2, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website Part 2

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website

Join Margie Schneider, VP Operations and Susan Cruz of the SEO team of TenGoldenRules.com as they present, “Ten Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website.”

This presentation will explain the following topics:

• Why links to your website are so important for Google and for site traffic
• Content and link building strategies
• What is link bait? And how to make it work for you
• Leading edge strategies including co-citation, social media links, articles and PR links
• How to utilize link building tactics
• New and different types of websites you can get links from

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Ten Strategies for Building Links TO Your Website

Is Your Link Profile Natural?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about link building and the importance of your Deep Link Ratio. That post explained that backlinks built to your site – including your deep link ratio, the anchor text used in the links, and the speed at which those links are acquired - should always appear “natural” to the search engines. Taking this one step further, the “natural approach” should apply to your entire link profile (incoming and outgoing).

So, what does this mean to your inbound link building efforts?

First, a healthy mix is necessary. And not every link needs to be perfectly optimized. Although this might seem contrary to what you have learned about SEO practices, even some no-follow and links without anchor text are desirable to ensure the right "mix."

Second, it means spending some time analyzing and understanding not only your own link profile, but also that of your competitors. Learn what they are doing, leverage it, and do just a little bit better. Just don't overdo it - that's not natural either!

Remember, every site has “good” and “not so good” links. As long as you stay within the “average” of other sites in your industry, your link profile should appear “natural.”

Here's a few Link Building Tools that can help:

• MagesticSEO
• Link Research Tools
• SEomoz Tools

How Many Backlinks Does Your Website Have?

Building backlinks (links from other websites) to your website is a common tactic in most search engine optimization campaigns. Knowing how many backlinks your website has and monitoring the growth is an important aspect of assessing the success of your linkbuilding campaign. If you don't know how to determine the number of backlinks your website has, here is a simple command to give you an idea.

In Yahoo search, use the following query:
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com -site:www.yourdomain.com

Of course you will substitute "yourdomain" with your actual domain name. For example, if you wanted to know how many webpages link to the www.tengoldenrules.com website, the Yahoo query would look like this:

linkdomain:www.tengoldenrules.com -site:www.tengoldenrules.com

This will provide you a good estimate of how many backlinks your website has.

New Linkbuilding Challenges on Digg

Digg has now decided to add nofollow tags to external links on their website, which is unfortunate for those who use Digg as part of their linkbuilding strategy. This does not, however, count Digg out for building links. They are not adding the nofollow tag to all links, but rather just the ones they are not too sure about because they don’t just want to vouch for a website.

In order to get a do follow link on Digg, a story has to look real to them. Popularity is a good indicator to Digg that a story is real. For the linkbuilder, it is now more important than ever to publish relevant, valuable content on Digg that people will actually want to read and join the conversation. This is how the story will reach a threshold of popularity that Digg finds acceptable to give out do follow links.

Building Natural Looking Links

When building links for search engine optimization purposes, the best thing you can do is to make your links look natural. If you are actively building links to your website, you want to make these links look like people just decided to link to your website because it has good content. Since search engines increase your rankings for having natural links while they can penalize you if you are buying/selling links, it is important to cover your tracks.

One of the most common mistakes when building links unnaturally is to use exactly the same anchor text, for example a keyword phrase you are targeting, for a large number of links. If your links are natural, there is a very slim chance that everyone that links to you will use identical anchor text, and the search engines know this. If you use variations in your anchor text, your links will look more natural. For example, if you are targeting the phrase “internet marketing consultant”, when choosing anchor text for new links, sometimes use “internet marketing consulting” or “consulting for internet marketing” and other variations.

Another issue is your link growth. If your site has never generated more than five links in a month, then all of a sudden it generates 200 links in a month, this can look very unnatural to the search engines. If you are starting a linkbuilding campaign, start slow. Each month, try to get a few more backlinks than the previous month.

The key to a successful linkbuilding campaign is making the links appear to be natural. If you can accomplish this, you will see much better ranking results.

Linkbuilding for SEO - Quality Over Quantity

A common misconception that can be a crutch to people running a search engine optimization campaign is that getting as many links as possible is the ultimate way to reach those high search results. Yes, having loads of backlinks will generally help improve organic rank, but the quality of those links is what will make the real difference. Several basic factors should be considered about a site when requesting a link from it:

• Relevance to your site
• Neighborhood it builds
• Backlinks to that site

Relevance - What keywords are you targeting? Are those keywords on the page you are requesting a backlink from? These are the questions you should be asking in order to build a quality link. The more relevant the page is to your site, the more a link from it will be worth to you.

Neighborhood - What other sites is the page linking to? Ideally, other links on the page from which you are requesting a link would be to sites exactly like yours. This will help put you in the right neighborhood as far as Google is concerned. If a page links to sites that resemble your site, Google will consider these sites to be related to yours and that is a good thing. If a page links to your site and a bunch of porn and gambling sites, Google will consider your site to be related to porn and gambling, which can have a dire effect on your results.

Backlinks to the page - How powerful is a page that you are looking for a link from? A page that has no backlinks is not near as powerful as a page that has hundreds of backlinks. If a page that has hundreds of backlinks links to your site, the power of those hundreds of links is also shared with you.

These are just a few basic things that should be observed when building links. More will be shared in later posts. Keep reading!

Five Link Building Tips

There's no denying that link building is a time consuming and repetitive process. However, there are ways to speed up the process and keep it relatively painless:

1. Directory Text - Create a few different titles and descriptions for your site. Vary the word count, key phrases and your target audience in order to be considered for a variety of directories.

2. PageRank - Look for quality directories with a Google PageRank of 3 or better.

3. Update Your List - Constantly update your list of directories. This includes deleting old directories and updating changes in PageRank.

4. Comments - Create a comment column on your list of directories where you can note specific information about the directory. This is useful for niche or regional directories.

5. Save the Date - When you submit to a directory, record the date submitted. Knowing when you submitted lets you know when you can expect to be included. Most free directories have a waiting period of a few months.