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
-
No-follow Links - Do they work for SEO?
Seems like some of the big sides only give no-follow links now are they still useful for building link authority? Do you have any experience? Thanks
Link Building | | seoman101 -
Should I focus on building links to my homepage, or internal pages?
I'm hiring several PA's to contact site's linking to my competition. Should we try to get links to content pages (blog post, article, etc) or build links directly to my homepage? More info: My site is a web application, so most links will naturally fall on the homepage. If links to content are more important we'll need to change our strategy. We are pitching the free version of the application to universities and schools as a resource for their students.
Link Building | | Dunjenman0 -
Better link building is hardest to achieve in 2014
In a simple words. My site has good quality content not copies 100% original. Have good social points more then 500 or twitter, fb, g+ (200) and now what to do with ranking. should i start linking, but where, please don't refer me any-page. As my thinking all old link building method are now died, like comment, rss, classifieds, footer links, directories. etc At this time i am thinking the powerful link building is hard to achieve in whole process of seo. Now any one tell me where do i start, linking to my site .....? (I also research on competitors but there links are all from contextual and linking domain sites DA is more then 70, and i can't even able to get one link by scraping more then 200 sites.) Thanks .
Link Building | | seom20140 -
Link building for big webite. 2500+ posts.
We run a big kids website: http://mocomi.com/ and have over 2500+ posts. Its about 2 years old now. No SEO was done on this site until the last two months when I was hired for SEO. I divided the SEO into 2 parts - on-page and off-page SEO. For the last 1.5 months I did the on-page fixing - correcting URLs, optimizing posts with best keywords, adding meta titles and descriptions to each post, 301 redirects etc. Now that on-page optimization is over, I have to do the off-page thing - build links. But with so much content I'm confused on how should I go forward. Among the 2500 posts I have listed down 700 posts that have real traffic potential so I'm planning to build links to these. But 700 is a huge number which includes our home page, 50+ category pages and rest are posts. So the question is how should I build links to these? Should I pick up each page and build links to it and move to next or as some people suggested, build most links to home page and category pages and that'll pass pagerank to my posts and help them rank. What link building plan would you suggest? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | Mocomi0 -
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 -
Directories and Link Building
I was reading a post by Eric Enge, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/role-of-directories-in-link-building and nobody talked about in the comments, so I want to see what you think: Considering that get some bad links from punished directories is bad for your site, it's worth to use site submissions softwares, like SubmitEaze, that promisses a 1,000 submits?
Link Building | | seomasterbrasil
Do you use it, what you think about it? [title edited by staff for clarity]0 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0