Hi All, New, I'm new to link building/cultivating/development. I've been tasked with seeding the page oakfurnitureland.co.uk/category/coffee-tables/ but I've got the issue that the 1st 100+ results on all the search engines for the term "oak coffee tables" are saturated with competitors and Affiliate Marketing pages. How do I find pages that I can make an actual contribution whilst building the links I need? Cheers, Mike
Hey Mike, first of all don't believe all the hype about relevancy, it doesn't exist. A few places to start: -Forum Sig's -Forum Profiles -Video -Podcast -Hubpages/Squidoo/Other Web 2.0 Properties -Blog -Blog Comments -Press Releases -Articles There are tons of good ways to build a mass of links in relatively short periods of time
From SEO moz, the Yahoo backlink count is a better predictor of domain strength than Google's backlink checker. Yahoo backlink count includes many links which are no follow comment links, pingback links, and pretty much anything that gets picked up. Links from authority sites are still way better than nofollow links from sites like Squidoo or article marketing, but sometimes you just have to settle for what you can get. the other problem obviously is that product sites don't naturally build links. Who will naturally link to your product page from an authoritative site with a dofollow link using your desired keyword anchor text? Pretty much no one. Unless you're into buying links which is a violation of Google's webmaster terms. Despite being a violation, I get offers from even major companies, some Fortune 500, that are violating Google's TOS. If you get caught though, you're site will get killed by Google which is what you don't want, of course.
If you go to your competitors sites and check for their backlinks and then just get a link similar to the one they have if it is possible, you are at least on your way. Trying to be niche specific is sometimes just impossible so drift afield a little whilst staying generally on theme if that makes sense. Example, shopping sites or Craft/woodturning sites for your current project.
Prepare an Informative Guide and publish as a free ebook that can also help your site to enhance number of backlinks
Cheers, time for some good old fashioned SEOmoz reading and joing ALOT of forums to post links in sigs. Mike
My recommendation therefore is to be a snail at the beginning of an SEO campaign and eventually build to faster pace. I have now seen two sites (including this one) use this slow, natural technique to get links over the course of several weeks, and rank quite well for a variety of searches. This strategy can be effective because despite the fact that the site doesn't rank for any competitive terms, it will still be able to rank for the obscure searches that generally make up 35-40% of a site's traffic.
I've launched a number of new sites over the past year. I've never run into trouble with Google, but I don't do anything that's not white hat anyway. However, I find quite consistently that a new site on a brand new domain is going to suck at pulling traffic for at least 2 months. It's that whole Google Sandbox thing. I find this to be the case even when I leverage post links from my other sites that are strong. Maybe if you get a link from Mashable or Problogger, you might start ranking well sooner, but otherwise you've just gotta wait.
That's pretty normal, don't you think? Any new business in an offline capacity would take a few months to gain any real market share. As much as we all like to complain about Google, the weight that is given to domain age (especially at the beginning) really does make sense.
Forums and blogs are a great way to get started. There are tons of each, so it will keep you busy for a while. Then I would write a ton of articles.