Seo Services Spain Blog

Ok, Ive just spent the last half an hour reading some of the posts on SEO Chat can’t believe how much these guys waffle on about acquiring backlinks to a website. These guys seem to spend all of their time analyzing this and analyzing that and waffling on about whats good and what’s not as if they REALLY know for sure. Most of it is speculation. My god, Ive read Zen books that were easier to work out compared to some of these posts.

Well I thought I would post here and let you know what I think about link building. What it is, Why we need it and exactly how to achieve it without busting too many blood vessells in your brain.

What is Link Building 

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo value links from one website to another. Basically the more links you get from one website to your website using the correct anchor text which contain your targeted keywords, the better rankings you will eventually obtain in the search engines for your keywords.

But its not just a question of quantity. Quality is also a must. The best links would be links from pages/sites that are of the same niche as yours, have a good PR if possible(to pass PR link juice), come from a site that has matured(old as possible), has been well indexed by the search engines and has good backlinks itself from other authoritive websites.

That said, almost ALL links are good and you shouldn’t spend too much time analyzing in too much detail how good a backlink is going to be. If you do this, you spend too much time analyzing and not enough time building.

So link building is the practice of getting lots of good links pointing back to your website and its pages using the correct anchor text.

How to get links

But getting links is NOT easy. People will not link to you unless you have some fantastic original content(ie not crap) or you have deep pockets(yes I mean buying links). So here are my top tips for gaining links, in no specific order.

1. Become and expert in your field and write – When you know your niche well and can become an expert in your field you will be able to write naturally and easily. You will then be able to write good articles and blog posts that people will want to link to naturally, which in turn creates good organic links from possible hundreds if not thousands of sites.
2. Use article directories – Once you are able to write well on your chosen topic, write some great and interesting articles and put them on as many article directories as you can. Some article dirs will distribute your article to hundreds of article directories and other publishers for a small fee which is worthwhile. And before someone mentions duplicate content, yes I know. There is lots of duplicate content on the web and a lot comes from news agencies. Do they have bad rankings, hell know. Besides, a good article is not about SEO, its about establishing yourself as a leading writer in your field and your website as the leading hub. SEO is secondary. You will get some good backlinks anyway, so don’t worry.
3. Give stuff away – On your site, give away for free things like software, tools, docs, lists, photo’s, graphics and anything else that will drive visitors to your site and make people link to your site naturally.
4. Exchange Links - Seek out relevant sites to your own and where possible exchange links with the webmasters. This can be time consuming and personally I dont do much of it but sometimes people ask me and i oblige them. If you can get recipricols from relevant sites that are older than yours and also have good PR then thats a bonus.
5. Add your site to Directories - Add your website to as many free web directories(and some paid) as possible. You can use services such as Directory Maximizer who charge $0.14 per directory. You can also add to some good paid directories which are generally a lot stronger in the eyes of the search engines. Take a look at Directory Critic for a full list.
6. If you use forums as I do, if possible put one or two links to your site in your signature. Then every time you post you will have another link back to your site.
7. Comment on blogs that interest you(but don’t comment spam) and put a link back to your site.
8. Link Baiting – This also boils down to writing and producing good original content. Write something really ground breaking(do lots of research first) and submit it to digg, reddit or delicious. If its good enough you could get hundreds of links. Not easy though as a lot of social bookmarking sites are full of techies and unless your page is about computers, politics, conspiracy theories or something else of the mainstream then it may not do well.
9. Buy Some Links - I know Google frown upon it but so what, if you don’t do it your competitors will. Besides those hypocrites were the bloody founders of paid links(ok maybe not the founders but the most successful at using them) with their adsense network clogging up the net. So who are they to tell people not to buy and sell links? Everything has a price, links included. Just be careful how you do it and do your research into the sites first before purchasing. Make sure the domains are not dropped from the search engines first. For me personally, this is one of the best ways to obtain links, costs a little but can buy you a hell of a lot of time.
10. Ask your customers to link to you – If you have a good site, nicely ask your customers and friends to link to you. If you don’t ask you will not receive. You will be surprised how many will.

Well, there are 10 of the best ways to obtain links. At the forefront is the need to create good content for your site. If you have excellent content you will never have to ask anyone for links as people will link to you naturally. Look at some of the big sites, Amazon, Slashdot, Google, BBC. Do you think these guys spend all their time trawling the net looking for link exchange’s? Of course not, their content is great, so people link to them naturally. CONTENT is KING people. Its what the web is all about and is what we all crave. It doesn’t matter how good your ranking is, if your website is full of crap nobody will want to link to it or stick around for long.

So what are you waiting for? Get building!