It’s easy to get discouraged with your SEO if you allow yourself to listen to the “gurus.” The “gurus” will tell you that you have to spend a ton of money on their services or products in order to unlock the secret to SEO. They’ll tell you that there are tricks and hacks that only they know that will jettison you to the front page of Google in a matter of minutes.
What a bunch of…well…you know.
You don’t have to know the details of the Google crawler algorithm to know that getting to the front page of Google is really about doing some basic common sense stuff. This is especially true with regards to link building. Here are the most important things you can do when you want to build links to your site (and, by extension, improve your Google page rank).
Using Relevant, Niche Sites
There are hundreds of different advertising companies out there that promise you a million dollar link building campaign. Most of these companies simply spam your link out to sites through blasters and other black hat methods.
What you want is to find an advertising agency that will post your link or ad on websites that have been vetted and are relevant to your niche. You want a service that has dedicated outreach and a stable base of sites that they work with and on which they publish content. You don’t want your ad on just any site. You want it on the right site. A good ad placing company will know this and, more importantly, know how to do this.
Organic Linking
Organic linking is what it sounds like: getting someone to mention your site organically in their content. Organic links “weigh more” on the search algorithm and with readers. Without a dedicated outreach or link building team, there are only a few ways to get these links:
- You can offer to guest post on a person’s blog in exchange for that post organically linking to your site.
- You can get another site to review your site.
- You can create a great site of your own that people want to link to (this is the best but takes the most work).
Engaging the Blogosphere
Leaving comments on someone else’s site is always a good idea. It helps you build links back to your own site and it helps you build relationships with other website owners and bloggers. You can’t just leave any old comment, though. Your comment has to be relevant. “Nice site,” will (more often than not) get your comment kicked over to the spam pile. Instead, actually read the post and come up with a thoughtful and relevant thing to say about it. Include something from the post itself to prove that you read it.
A good comment doesn’t just grab the attention of the site owner. It grabs the attention of the site’s other readers. Links left in comments won’t give you SEO juice but they’re good for your traffic and could lead to some great organic links.
Link building is something that can be time consuming. It is better, though, to spend the time doing the work organically than to risk your reputation by hiring a black hat service that promises the moon.That is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make.
Article contributed by Jenna Smith