Building links – Quality over quantity

I read a lot of guides on how to build links. Many of them right here on DP. I am not saying that the guides are of poor quality but most of them seem to focus on quantity not quality. They talk about blog commenting, social bookmarking, article marketing and blog commenting. All good method to build a lot of links fast but not the way to build quality links that will truly help you in the SERPs. It is true that you can often rank less competitive keywords using these techniques but one quality link is worth a lot of low quality links when trying to rank more competitive terms. This makes high quality links worth going after even if they require more time to build than lower quality links. Especially as high quality links will increase the value of lower quality links as well as your website trust will raise. Below I will describe some of the techniques I use to build quality links. I have acquired 2 PR6, numerous PR5, and a lot of PR4 last week alone using these techniques. (none of them directory links)

Directories:
Directories are a good way to get link to new sites but don't go out and submit your site to all directories you can find. Limiting yourself to 30-35 high quality directories requires a lot less time and will get better results as you will get a better link profile. When it comes to directories fewer links can actually mean better rank.

Article marketing:
Article marketing is a great way of acquiring high quality links but forget about article directories. Instead you should try becoming a guest author. I suggest that you contact authority sites related to yours and offer to write unique content for their website in return for an author link. If you can write quality content you should be able to build a lot of one way links this way. Remember to show courtesy in you emails when you contact websites offering to be a guest writer and include information on why you are qualified to become a guest author. Only use this method if you can provide quality content. If your articles turn out to be of poor quality when you submit them they will not be published. As you publish articles on more and more web sites it becomes easier and easier to become a guest author as you become an authority. Try to write in niche magazines to increase your authority. There are also a lot of blogs like romow.com that allows you to be a guest blogger.

Social bookmarking/digg:
Social bookmarking can be great way to get links but should be use as a method to get links not as a source of links. Start by creating link worthy content on your website and use social bookmarking to get exposure for the content. I recommend using digg for this.

Start by creating an account with at least 300 mutual friends: This takes some time but is worth the time in the long run. Submit your story during US work hours as that is when most people are on digg and send a shout to your friends to digg your story. Remember that you can only shout to 100 friends at a time so you need to shout them in batches. This should normally be enough to put the story on the first page and generate a lot of traffic. If your content is indeed link worthy you will receive a lot of links. Don't shout your friends to often.

Blogging:
I was a bit sceptical to this at first but you really should get a blog for your website. I recommend giving the blog a little wider scope than the website itself. In other words if you have a website about Ferraris you add a blog about cars. The blog is still relevant for your main website topic but the broader scope make it easier to attract links to it from other blogs. There are a lot more blogs about cars than there are about Ferraris. Make sure that you only post quality content on the blog and that it is frequently updated if you want the full benefit of your blog. If the main purpose of your blog is to build links to your domain you should keep it ad free or with very little ads. If you do that you should have no trouble to get other bloggers to link to your blog. In most niches you should be able to collected enough links to have the blog debute as a PR5 or at least a PR4

Toplists:
A year ago I would have said that this was a thing of the past but in the last year it has started to pop up more and more quality toplists with SEO friendly links to get listed on. This technique is most suitable for established sites that already have decent traffic as this will allow you to rank higher on the toplists. In this case you should be able to get a few PR5 and perhaps even PR6 links from top lists.

In conclusion:
This was just a few methods that you can use to build high quality links (can't give away all my tricks) If you spend some time thinking and get a little inventive I am sure you will be able to figure out a few other methods as well.

Remember that a truly good link can be worth a days work or more as it can catapult your serps towards the top and send 1000s of highly targeted visitors to your website each month. I also want to recommend that you always point your links to the most closely related page on your website even if that isn't your homepage or the term you want to rank for. A link from the nr1 ranked widget site might catapult your widget page to top 5 or higher for that term but will not elevate your homepage or other less relevant pages that much if you point the link towards those pages. The main page etc will still benefit and rank better due to the new link even if isn't targeted directly at the first page.

Please excuse linguistic errors in this text as it was written in an a hurry and I didn't have time to (felt like) read through it.

just my 2c about link building

 

Hi.

Thanks for your guide.
I just wish to read this guide one month ago. I spend on ebay alot money to buy links for my web site.
I never I will buy links again, and always I will look from now for quality links.
Nice Guide. I will follow your Instructions,and I will keep coming back to read it.

 

Thanks for the great tips, I like the Digg idea

 

Yeah! digg is great.. and same also with other bookmarking sites..

 

Blogging is my favorite. Rest is just submission stuff, whereas with blogging, you learn and share knowledge. True spirit of internet.

 

Too bad you will wait from a few months to infinity to get listed in the best 30 directories. Unless you pay of course.

Nice post by the way!

 

Please do consider Squidoo and Yahoo Answers for link building.

 

whatever william has written is true.. but writing articles, blogs, etc will take ages to increase your serp.. the best way is still getting registered in top paid directories . as yahoo.com

 

thanks for the guide

 

Puzzle: Yahoo answer is greate for traffic but do less for ranking.
Squidoo and hubpages are not as effective as they once were. Knol is a new alternative that I still haven´t made up my mind about.

harshagarwal5: I agree that top tier directories are great but can´t always take you all they way. You are right that my methods take a lot of time but I personally think it is worth it if you build a quality site that has staying power. If youa are targetting a temporary buzz these techniques are not for you.

The rest of you. Thanks for the kind words.

 

Article marketing is great, but not submitting to traditional article directories

 

Where should we submit to?

 

d best ones being
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.isnare.com/

 

Indeed. I believe on the contrary, most have supported quality more than quantity. I may be the only person who found less effect from quality. My competitions have too many backlinks from obviously PR0 sites and they have almost my search rankings. I have several PR5 links and even some PR6 links and I have only slightly better traffic than them. I work hard at soliciting links. Do you think it's not going to work or something?

 

Yahoo answers does not help in terms of "link building" (links are nofollow), but they do add exposure to your site and bring in some extra hits.

There's more to search engine optimization than just links. See what your competitors are doing in terms of on-page SEO as well as what sort of anchor text they're using, and try to combat them (beat them, join them / whatever). If you really do have links on more authoritative sites, then you should prevail in the end.

 

Finally a voice of sanity around here, rather than thread after thread of Dofollow lists.

William, I know you wrote your post in haste (I read every word) and I think a lot of people are going to overlook the value of deep-linking to internal pages of their site. This is a very important aspect in developing links.

People are constantly submitting the same homepage link, with the same anchor text. Over and over again. This falls under the 'if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times' category and severely limits your range of topical keywords that you can rank for -- especially if the anchor text is out of context with the page it appears on.

 

spot on mate!

 

i love blogging and if for instance my client is about real estate, i blog about properties and houses, i always assume to reach wider audience other than loan takers and realtors

 

nice tips you got there!anyway blogging could be more beneficial and easy to update and crawled by spiderweb.but I don't think that it is easy to blog a real estate.

 

I have seen a fairly large network of Real Estate blogs. Just happened upon them a couple of weeks ago. They are a pretty savvy group and link between each other like crazy, have the blogging thing down. They are using trackbacks and comment on each others blogs. Close knit group.

A lot of discussions I have seen of late are about flipping properties quickly. All are doing extremely well.