No matter what Google and the other major search engines seem to do to make search listings (SERP) less exploitable, it seems that link building to some extent or another, remains a constant for SEO purposes.
However, it is important to understand that although link building is still a very useful tool for raising SERP, it is far more difficult to achieve good, and more importantly consistent results using link building then it has been previously.
What is Link Building?
Link building is a name given to a specific SEO technique that is designed to raise the authority level of a site, and this it’s Google PageRank, which will in turn, raise its position in SERP.
Wikipedia gives a good explanation of exactly what link building is – you can read it here.
In its most basic form, an SEO practitioner will aim to raise SERP by generating backlinks to the target site, at both the root level and also backlinks to subpages on the same domain.
The more backlinks, the higher a sites Google PageRank will climb, and the higher it will be featured in SERP.
Links can come from a variety of sources, including forum posts, blog comments, article submissions and press release publication.
Anywhere that a webmaster can publish something that contains a link (and it cannot be a nofollow link), then they can create a backlink.
In reality things are a little more complicated than this.
Building Quality Links
Major search engines are aware that SEO practitioners use artificially created backlinks to raise SERP, and have taken action to devalue certain types of links.
Google in particular has some pretty harsh guidelines that webmasters need to follow to make sure they are not actually penalised for generating low quality backlinks. You can read more about these guidelines here.
Links are also covered by part of the Google Webmaster Guidelines that can be found here:
If you read these thoroughly, you will realise that spam forum posts with a backlink embedded in them, and similarly blog comments, are now considered pretty low quality backlinks.
It’s the same with many article directories; these have also been devalued considerably.
Currently, the best way to generate quality backlinks in line with Google’s recommendation is to seek them organically, and encourage others to link to your site, instead of looking for link opportunities.
This is best achieved by using social marketing techniques and publishing quality content.
Building Backlinks Organically
Until just a few short months ago, SEO gurus would literally manufacture backlinks, sometimes using automated software, and pump out thousands of forum posts and blog comments. This is now a pretty much defunct black hat SEO practice.
These day’s it’s all about organic backlinks.
Gaining backlinks organically is actually not so difficult, but it does take longer to build a large number of backlinks.
The process is simple, publish some great content, and then promote it. If the content is useful, the viewers will link to it naturally.
Building backlinks in the old style can now negatively affect your site.Organic is the way to go.
Monitoring Backlinks
There are lots of sites that offer backlink monitoring services. However, the main tool used by SEO experts is simply Google Webmaster tools.
In the traffic section, there is a report that shows current backlinks to the site, it looks like this:
Here we can see how many backlinks are pointing at the site, and the content that has the most links pointing to it.
This is really all that is needed to keep an eye on backlinks.
Many of the paid services that offer to keep track of backlinks to a site are querying Google anyway; they are a waste of cash.
Backlinks for Traffic
One of the major benefits of building backlinks organically is that they will also bring traffic. A spam blog comment won’t even get read, let alone bring traffic from somebody clicking the link.
However, a proper organic backlink created by a reader who liked your content, is sure to bring in traffic in its own right.
You can use Google Analytics to track this traffic, look in the traffic section of the site, under referrals, the report looks like this:
In Conclusion
There are many guides on link building on the web.
Unfortunately, most of these are entirely outdated, and do not take in to account the recent changes in link guidelines by the likes of Google.
If you choose to use black hat link building techniques, your site will invariably suffer at some stage. Keep things organic and grow quality links over time.
Click here to see how AffiliateX can help you grow your online business today.
No comments:
Post a Comment