link building good bad ugly
As you may already know (or if you don’t) link building is considered one of the most important things to do in SEO. However, Link Building can be very hard and can be very time to consume, if you don’t have the patience or get stressed easily then link building is not the right path.
In this blog, I will be talking about Link building tools, how to acquire good links and also links that work but will only work if you use them correctly!
The Good
Good links can be a tricky subject, as the term “Good links” keeps on changing from year to year.
However from my understanding external links are good links, as these links can be hard to acquire.
What I mean by this is to get a link pointing to your website from a different website; this link can be located anywhere on the external website, such as the useful links page or being mentioned in a blog post.
To get these links you will have to get in touch with the company first, to do this you will need to look for a “contact us page” or anything that can give you the information to contact them, this information can be also be located on social media accounts or in the footer of their website. From here you can contact them and try to get them to put your link “a link that points to your website” on their webpage.
When contacting the external website makes sure that you are
- Friendly
- Not too long
- Getting to the point fast but not too blunt
The Benefits of getting in contact with external people is that you can not only get a link from their website but it could lead on to other opportunities
If you manage to get a link on to somebody else’s website this means that it is a good link with value.
There are other things that you must take into account in pursuit of the “perfect link”
- How popular the website is
- Is the website up to date
- Trust
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the best way to communicate with people without selling something to them.
Make sure that you are researching what you are writing about. Also, remember to get your research from multiple websites as one website could say one thing and another website says completely different.
When you have finally finished typing make sure that you go back and read through it because good content makes a person stop…read and think.
In a link building perspective, you want to make sure that people are reading your blog and are linking to you.
Interlinking is the procedure of making links from within a blog or a website.
The other way of linking is inbound linking which means external sources are linking to your website. The perfect example of this is “MOZ” who get people linking up to that blog externally when they publish one.
Why you might ask? Because people trust them as a source.
Unfortunately, this means that the little folk have to work harder for links, having to branch out and make friends with other bloggers throughout the web in order to get these links.
Really Bad
For those of you who didn’t know, directories are no longer the same as they used to be. As SEO’ers abused these directories by spamming them with links and more links, these directories can sometimes be dangerous.
The best way to look at it is that people are not likely to go onto directories to get to the page that they would like to get to.
With that being said not every single directory is bad there are a couple out there that have a value such as dmoz.com
Other bad techniques that have been punished by Google algorithms in the past are Article directories which post self-written content, Paid links, Blogrolls & footer links
Very Ugly
Social bookmarking: For those of you who don’t have a clue, is when people send links from other websites to other people.
There are many different social bookmarking websites such as:
- Stumbleupon
- Delicious
- Diigo
- Folkd
- Blink list
- About.me
SEO’ers took advantage of social bookmarking by creating an account on these websites and adding links on them.
However you can still use this as a source of link building as long you up to date it and keep it fresh, just make sure that you use this technique properly and not aren’t just signing up to all social bookmarking profiles only choose a couple of these and concentrate on them by keeping them active.
Commenting on Blog posts is another thing that you should be aware of. When commenting on blog posts to get a link DONT just put “Great work” or “Keep it up” in the comment box, so basically anything short and easy to put down.
Don’t go off topic when you are commenting on blogs, and try and keep away from inputting links into the comment box/field.
When commenting on these blogs make sure that you’re commenting on a blog post that is not a “couple” of years old, make sure that the blog is up to date and that people are still commenting on the blog. Because websites that are a couple of years old will be no longer providing the same level of value anymore as it’s “out of date” compared to when it first arrived online.
So what you should do is: only look for the blogs that have the *website field* make sure that you read the blog so you get a better understanding when you write down what you are going to put. If possible try and “communicate” with the author of the blog or with other people as they may have their own views of the subject and get involved!
Be Careful
Make sure that the links on your website are not broken, the main things that you will have to look out for are:
- Internal links that are broken
- External links that are broken
Make sure that you fix these errors on your website as Google will be crawling your website and if the Google bot crawls these broken links its bad news.
Link Building tools:
There are many link building tools out there so make sure that you get the right tool that suits you best.
You will first need to know about how to check backlinks. From here you will be able to see how many links that website has, their link and root domains.
Domain authority – How powerful your domain name is.
The Domain authority consists of three things:
- The Age of your website.
- How popular your site is.
- And the size of your website.
Some Link building tools are: (Free)
- Open site explorer
- Semrush competitors research
Conclusion
Just like SEO link building is a component that is in a constant state of change, so the most important thing to do is to make sure that you keep on reading and keeping on top of link building news.
To sum up, everything here makes sure that you are full of enthusiasm and that you don’t get stressed out easily.
Make sure that you are careful as getting “bad links” could potentially have an effect on your rankings – which is all ways bad
I hope that you have found this blog useful and informative and that you now know about link building, I would be thankful if you could share this on your social networks to make people aware of what you have to do in the link building universe.