Top Five SEO Link Building Tips

Once you’ve set up your website the next most important thing to do is to start to build links. SEO link building is just as important as website optimization and is an ongoing process that needs to become part of your weekly routine in order to make your site the best it can be. To make matters more difficult, long gone are the days when you could just farm out link building to a company and buy hundreds or thousands of inbound links for your site. With Google having recently adjusted their algorithm to ensure that quality trumps quantity, it seems that SEO and link building will become more and more about quality over the coming months and years. With this in mind here are five tips to get the SEO and link building strategy of your site just right:

(1) Quality Content. It seems ridiculous to have to even have to suggest that quality content is important but most people think about content last. But read through most sites dedicated to SEO or Blogging and the concept of good quality writing is always treated as an afterthought. However Google’s change of algorithm makes this issue even more acute as it is their aim that original, good quality writing should be further up the search results and not hidden in a mass of terrible, keyword-obsessed, scraped content. Good quality writing will naturally create good backlinks and will bring more users to your site. What’s more, they will want to keep coming back. If the content is good, people will naturally link to you and recommend it to other people.

(2) Research Backlinks. When planning your SEO strategy & backlinks always go to your competitor’s website first to check which sites are providing them with backlinks. This is a great way to get your SEO campaign under way – anyone that is linking to your competitors will probably own a site that will link well with yours too. Then all you need to do is offer content that is better than your competitor. There are all kinds of tools out there to help you find these backlinks, from SEO Back Link Analyzer to SEO Spyglass.
(3) Quality Backlinks Only – Where possible, try to only go for higher quality backlinks. SEO links that are higher value will obviously bring greater link value to your site. Look for sites with a high PR rating, (at least PR 2 and above where possible) are a few years old, are not link farms or article farms. Also, ensure that your anchor text is of benefit – link on a search phrase relevant to your site, and not on ‘click here.’ Lastly, try to choose sites where there will not be numerous other links on the same page, as these will dilute the value and link juice of your link.

(4) Directory Submission – Though not as important as it used to be, there are still advantages to be gained by submitting your site to as many directories as possible. You can either submit your site yourself to directories you consider to be reputable or you can use a directory submission service that will automatically handle the submission process for you to more than 100 directories. Bear in mind that the most popular directories will not normally accept automatic submissions however.

(5) Local Directory Submission – Just as important as the global internet directories are local or national based directories of businesses which will help you appear in regional searches, improve your search ranking and also give you more specific and higher quality links.

Guest Blog by: Alex Simmonds is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in the UK. He can currently be found writing a daily financial blog on everything from mortgages to umbrella companies