SEO Link building from zero in a practical world
-
Hi, I'm a web developer with good knowledge of SEO friendly web development etc.
When it comes to link building Im not quite sure where to start. I have read heaps of articles about building links, but can you guys please tell me how to start building links from 'zero' in a practice world? Im not even sure whether I have anyone who can link to my website or my client's website either
Thanks heaps.
-
Hi Alice, Thanks for the tips. One question though, how do I draw the line between high quality links and low quality links, If you could give me some tips? Thanks.
-
Valuable tips are shared here, fellow SEOMOZers! It also worth adding some other ideas:
-
build your authentic profiles in the social web (create Facebook, Twitter, G+ profile) and foster the communication with your clients and suppliers (if relevant). Listen to them, follow them, share their content and promote their content. By doing this, you should manage to "sell" your content in a better way as you will have a community that you converse with you. Make sure that you regularly check for those people who influence the others and craft a strategy to attract them on your side (it depends on your website topic + whether it is B2B or B2C). Social media activities not only help you expand your reach among your most relevant prospects, but also aid you generate positive social signals which search engines pay attention to.
-
if your client does not run a startup company, then it's time to look back and find those people who shared the content, who tried to establish a conversation and outreach to them with something hot that you have right now for your company/product
-
don't forget your customers, once you've acquired them, always get back to find out what they like about your product and how they use it. Make a contest, a giveaway or simply support a community that is relevant to your website and is committed to giving to the others. You will show that you care about growing communities and by supporting non-commercial initiatives, you will show the genuine human nature of your company. Don't simply acquire, but give and you will receive even more.
I would like to also highlight what Matt has said, just make sure that your links are diversified, don't use the same anchors all over again. Additionally, it's important to monitor and watch our for suspicious spikes in your links (add links gradually over the time and conduct an audit for negative SEO, caused by a competitor...)
- Even though this is directly related to your question, I just want to quickly remind you not to overlook the power of good interlinking. Start establishing a good internal structure for your website first and then proceed with the link building process.
Excited about this discussion, it's nice to follow new tips and exchange knowledge after the latest G updates.
Cheers
-
-
Some good tips here to get you going. The key is to try and keep your link profile as natural as possible while concentrating on quality. Its not easy...
I would be careful about doing too many directories to start with, maybe pick 3 or 4 at the most. When your link profile gets better you can then come back and maybe do a few more.
A nice press release saying you have a new website would work fine too. Get it distributed around the web and this should build a couple of links. Again, don't go OTT with press releases, keep them to a minimum but it will give you a decent start.
-
I have taken this from a similar question I answered not long ago...
"I will try and keep this as basic as possible so if you need me to elaborate, please ask.
The best way to start (and often a step that people forget completely) is to approach company's who you already have had dealings with. Try some of the following:
Accountants, Solicitors, Suppliers, Friends, Local Newspapers, Customers, Marketing Company's, Software Company's... Any business that you have dealt with. It could be a plumber who fitted the kitchen, the builder who built the building, a welder who made your gate... Anything!
Chances are, these websites wont be that relevant to your market (and maybe not even very good) but they are always an important place to start.
Be creativewhen approaching them though - chances are they won't just want to link to you for no reason. Maybe write them an article for their blog or news section on their website. Maybe write a testimonial saying how pleased you are with them or their service and link back to your site within the testimonial.
Next on the list is to ask your website designer for a link (if you have one). If he/she is proud of the work they carried out, they would happily add your website to their portfolio on their own website and link to your site.
If you had a logo designed and think it looks pretty sexy, show it off! There are lots of logo directories that will have your logo on their site with a link back to your site.
I would also try a couple of good quality directories (ensure they are manually edited directories and don't look like link farms). Remember though, don't do too many directories - especially not to start with!
From here I would recommend writing a press release and getting it published around the web. Obviously the first press release should be titled something along the lines of "New Website Open For Business".
After the press release, ask a couple of friends (or even better - customers) to write a review of your website on a review site. Once you get a couple they start looking legit but don't go over the top!
This should get you hopefully a few links. From here-on you should start picking up skills and learning more about how to get better links and optimise more efficiently.
I would recommend that throughout this whole stage; every single one of your links uses branded anchor text (or naked anchor text). What I mean by this is use yourdomain.com or click here etc).
Hopefully this helps?"
-
Hi Ud U, Kevin's recommendations are all excellent.
I would add that building relationships with quality, relevant sites is a good long term strategy. For example, one of my clients offers pub tours. On my client's site we created a profile page for each of the pubs on the tour and contacted the pubs for input. The majority of them then linked to these profile pages without us even requesting it. We also got links from tourism sites and travel blogs.
The result was good quality content for my client's customers to read; a good set of longtail optimised pages; and over 30 relevant, high quality links. The bottom line is that building relationships with relevant sites (and I mean genuine relationships rather than some sort of linking partner) and quality content generation really can work for all parties involved.
Good luck.
-
It depends on the target website & your linking goals. An ecommerce website selling tires to Northern America is going to have different needs than a plumber in Chicago, IL.
As for some actionable answers, here are some fundamental links with examples:
- Business profiles such as aboutus.org
- Directory sites such as botw.com & crunchbase.com
- Vertical search engines like yelp.com & lawyers.com
- Informational sites like wikipedia.org
- Communities like forum.bodybuilding.com & homeowner-talk.com
- See this post for more ideas: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/inbound-marketing-is-taking-off
Those fundamentals won't get you very far. They'll help the spiders notice you.
The links that matter are going to take some work to find. They are going to be highly relevant directories, curated lists, forum/wiki communities, major trusted publications, etc. The links that matter will drive relevant traffic to your website. They will be earned by relationships, quality contributions and outreach.
Here's something to help frame your thought process & strategy: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I build internal links to my homepage?
Ive done a lot of internal linking before but its always been for other inner pages but now I need to do it for a websites homepage but this got me thinking if its even worth doing and should I be doing it at all? For the first question I was thinking that surely the homepage has more authority than any of my inner pages so how would internal links from inner pages help and for the second question Ive read a few posts like this Kissmetrics one here where it says you shouldnt do it. There are two types of links you should avoid using in your content: Homepage. Most sites have too many links to the homepage as it is. You would rather strengthen internal pages to boost the overall SEO of your site, rather than simply point more links at the homepage. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/commandments-of-internal-linking/ thoughts?
Link Building | | linklander0 -
How many links per week/month should a link building campaign acquire?
I am running a linkbuilding campaign for my company. I am mostly focusing on guest blogging opportunities and responding to emails from HARO. How many links would I have to acquire each week or month to be considered doing a good job over a 6 month or a year time period? Thank you,
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Quickest way to build links?
I'm in furniture e-commerce. I'm not new to e-commerce but I am new to SEO as I used to just hire everything out. What is the quickest way to build or should I say earn links? So far I've just been contacting bloggers and I've built about 4 links through guest posts in the past month. The problem is I can't tell if this is good or bad. I also contacted a niche directory and they liked my content so they are going to include my website in their directory for free next week. Should I continue doing what I'm doing? Do I need to be more aggressive? Suggestions? Thanks guys.
Link Building | | The_Kiwi_Man0 -
Affiliate Links & SEO
Hi Looking at my backlink profile I noticed that I had 150 links coming from one site. Ahhhh I thought in light if the recent Penguin updates. Upon closer inspection I noticed that my link is only on the homepage of that site but because that site sells its product via clickbank they have got loads of versions of that site because of its affiliates. For example: MAINSITE is www.mainsite.com then there are 150 affiliates using hoplinks via clickbank so its: www.mainsite.com?hopmrbig www.mainsite.com?blablahblah etc etc The question: Will this hurt me? In theory I got 1 link on their homepage but will Google see it as 150 versions of the same site? Your thoughts please? SMP
Link Building | | intmarkacademy0 -
Most significant link building factor
Am I right in thinking the most important link building factor is the number of unique linking root domains? Multiple links from a domain won't help me so much?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Link Building - Drawing a blank
I've been trying to get backlinks for one website for the past 2 weeks and it's proving almost impossible. Initially I drew up a list of websites that would be suitable to have a link on and tried e-mailing a contact on each. However, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Most are coming back saying I can add some content but they will charge. However, we don't have a budget. I've analysed competitor backlinks and they didn't reveal anything interesting. The website doesn't have a Twitter account. So I can't look for links that way. Another problem is that the website has a very niche audience and probably not the most active online. Does anyone have any other tips that would help?
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
Build links through blogging?
Although my site is a wordpress site it presently has about as many static pages as blog posts. The site has a lot of directory links and is doing pretty good with a PR3 after about a year. When I first put the site up I had a well known blogging expert help me with the permalinks and a couple of other things and he said that with a blog there is no need to build links, it can all be done through natural link acquisition off of the blog posts. I was skeptical at the time because it seemed that a lawyer's site was something not a lot of people would be interested enough in to link to it. Now I am thinking about trying his stragegy, as 1 of my blog posts that I put up on a very topical subject immediately got about 15 backlinks. My questions are: Is it reasonable to try to build links just by posting frequent topical blog posts? If yes, should I have links in the blog posts to my home page, to internal pages, or both? \ Paul
Link Building | | diogenes0 -
Link Building PR versus topic
Regarding link building, what counts the most in terms of PR and relevance(topic). Is it whether, the link comes from a domain/page with high domain/page rank or that the link come from a domain with similar/relevant content? I know, we should always aim to get links from domains with both relevance and good page rank. But which is most important? For example: If we have a web site about swiss made watches. Should i focus on getting links from other domains with information about swiss made watches. Or can i achieve just as good link juice, by getting links from un-related web sites with high PR? We will of course get more qualified traffic from related domains. But from a pure search ranking, what plays the biggest factor?
Link Building | | petersen0