I felt like there was a noticeable lack of in depth information and examples for link building on the internet. With that in mind, I am going to go over what I have found works based on some experience, research, and successful execution.
When I was first training in SEO, I was taught white hat, industry standard methods for everything.
Content was always user friendly with no unnecessary keyword stuffing. However one method I always questioned was our link building strategies. Using third party software we would crawl directory listings that are most relevant to our particular website, and try to add them.
None of these resources drive traffic, none of them would have high domain authority, and submitting them to the website was always a tedious and often unsuccessful task.
After a bit of research using sites such as Moz, I began learning best practices most SEO consultants; however I felt like there was a noticeable lack of in depth information and examples. With that in mind, I am going to go over what I have found works based on some experience, research, and successful execution.
Start with What You Know
Links are considered the highways of the internet while websites are the cities and towns, so make sure you can drive between all your cities. To start, any and all websites associated with your business need to link to one another. These links are completely free, yet people often don’t think to take them. Not only will this help with both domains’ authority, but people may be interested with related businesses and click through. An easy way of doing this is making a page dedicated to informing visitors of all of your related businesses with a link to their domain.
Receive some Good Will
Now that all of your domains are connected, you can start asking for links from anybody you spend money with. Whether that is vendors for your business or partners whom you trade services and supplies, these contacts should be more than happy to keep their customer happy. Now because most businesses you contact like this will not be as knowledgeable in SEO as you, so make sure to give them as much direction as possible. The only real requirement is that the link is on a page that is in the site map so it can be crawled by search engines.
Time to Reach Out
Now it’s time to create links with the intent for them to be clicked through. These links are very valuable and you would be hard pressed to find someone willing to give these up without something in return. However, google will penalize you if they find out you are paying for links, so you need to get creative with the resources you use. Instead of buying links try sponsoring a charity or local organization, then ask for a link out of good faith. Try collaborating with popular bogs associated with your business and posting on them as a guest while linking to your site. Finally, discuss exchanging links with businesses you tend to work closely with.
By using such resources as information, man hours, and other links, we can work together to become more successful in search engine optimization!