Best Link Building Practices

Ok so to continue my trend of writing about debates I have with people on the Keyword Academy forums I thought today I would write about best link building practices. There are important things to keep in mind while building links, but like most aspects of MMO ‘winning’ it is accomplished 99% through doing and 1% through thinking. So as my first point the most important thing about link building is just go out and do it instead of worrying about how to do it. A “no follow” link is better than no link at all. A link that is anchored with “click here” is worth more than no link at all. Are they the best, no, but they aren’t completely worthless either.

Ok so the ultimate thing we want to do is to try as best we can to make our links look natural to Google. That is essentially the goal of everything we do when building links. So the real question is what can I do to make my links look natural?

• Vary your anchor text – Natural links occur and get anchored in a ton of different ways. Don’t just anchor your one target keyword for every link you get, anchor things that are close to it, misspellings, your URL, your site name, and even the odd “click here”
• Deep linking – People who get natural links don’t just get links to their homepage, in fact a lot of the time people send their friends links to interesting articles or write about cool things they see on a site. Deep linking to your individual pages is important and a lot of the time is can be profitable too because you can use your deep pages to target more keywords.
• Quality vs. Quantity – What’s the answer to this old question? Well the answer is both. If all you get are crappy links well then your site is going to take forever to rank, but you don’t need to worry about getting every link from a PR9 site. A link from a forum isn’t going to give you as much value as a link from the NY times, but 1000 might and might be easier to get.
• Blogroll vs. In Content – There is always a lot of debate around blogroll and how valuable they are. A lot of people (some of whom make a lot more money than I do) say in content links are the only way to go, but I can tell you I’ve had more than my fair share of luck with blogrolls. Mix it up and get both.
• Speed – When you start a new site you don’t want to blast the links out too fast. Instead start out slowly and build up momentum like an avalanche . Eventually you’ll be able to send your site as many links as you want, but the growth needs be be slow and natural.
• Related Niche – Sites from a related niche are better than links from an unrelated site. Google looks not only what links are pointing to your site, but what links (internal and external) are pointing to your links.
• Links from the Same Site – The more sites you build links from the better. Don’t think that two links from the same site isn’t providing you any value, but two links from two different sites are better than two links from the same site. This is not only good for authority, but it’s diversity. If one of those sites go away at least you still have one link when you could potentially not have any links left.

Anyway that’s just a basic overview of the best linking practices. I’m sure we could think up experiment after experiment to test out each best practice, but hey, it’s not worth the time when you could be spending it just building links. Now stop reading and go get yourself some links.