I am interested in suggestions on how to get started link building for my dealership websites, and group hub. We represent national brands such as honda, acura, nissan, chevy, ford, ect. Any help in a dos and donts kind of fashion would be great! I would obviously like to avoid any negative link building. Out of the gates I was thinking of using major "automotive directories" and starting there. (Please go easy on me, this is my first post!) Thanks in advance.
There are thousands of automotive forums out there. Sign up to all of them and put your links in the signatures. Write automotive articles so automotive sites will add your article to their content (with a signature link of course) Participate at automotive blogs. Find sites that might be willing to trade a high quality article for a link to your site. (guest writer) this also give you authority. I've taken several of these on my automotive site, some of the pages are now PR 6 (Increase gas mileage)
yes, you can certainly start with automotive niche directories and submit there, but there are also ton of other directories with automotive categories where you can submit also. other thatn directory submission, you can find relevant blogs and make usefull comments that will not only give you backlinks but also add value to the blogs, write unique articles and submit them to the article directories, do social bookmarking, etc. posting on automotive forums with your signature as adviced above is also a good idea which will also give you backlinks. these will keep yuo busy for a while. also, read this forum on a regular basis and there are lot of usefull discussions from time to time
Wow, I am very appreciative. Thank you. Keep the advice coming! I have an additional question. Please let me know if I am off base. Lets say I wanted to target keywords such as "chicago honda", would getting backlinks from high ranking websites resulting from this search benefit even more? Is this the best way to find the best sites to persue backlinks from? Thanks again!
If you can get them, those would probably be some of the best links. However high ranking site using the keywords you want will probably not want to give their competitors a link.
you can link to your homepage or inner pages depending on your SEO objective. if there is only one specific keyword you are targetting and your homepage is optimized for that KW, then yes. but if you have inner pages with other keywords you want to get ranked for, then you need to do deep linking to the inner pages as well.