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So, you have a well designed website with quality content, interesting stuff to tell people, and your unique and excellent products and services to offer – but where’s the traffic? “If you build it, they will come” may sound good in the movies, but it doesn’t provide you much in the way of SEO help and it doesn’t always play out that way on the Internet. Instead, you’ve got to get out there and hustle for that traffic, and one important part of doing that is link building.
Link building activities, if done correctly, serve to both drive traffic to your site and improve your SEO. There are many different ways of building links, both internal and external, but today, we’re just going to cover just a few of the basics of link building strategies to get you started with the SEO help you need.
When it comes to link building, you have the links you make yourself and the links that other people give you. What you want to aim for is to get a decent balance between the two, because the search engines tend to prefer sites that are well-balanced in that way. You’ll also need to be aware that some links are “worth” more in terms of SEO value than others, depending on things like their placement on the page, their anchor text, relevancy, and more.
3 Basic Link Building Tips
Watch for Relevancy – Relevancy is one of the most important parts of any link building activity. Links will only do you any good if they are relevant – that means that if you ask a site to link back to yours, then the linking site should somehow be relevant to your topic, whether they’re linking directly to your homepage or a single blog post on a topic of interest to their own readers and visitors. This also applies when you’re leaving comments on blogs or forums, and other similar activities – sure, you might leave a link there, and some people might click it, but how much good will it really do you if you sell industrial ovens and the site linking back to you is about financial planning?
Watch for Quality – Quality is also incredibly important, and goes hand in hand with relevancy. When you’re building links, you want the sites linking back to you to be high quality. Popular sites with lots of visitors are higher quality than those with less visitors. Stay away from link farms – entire blogs and sites that exist solely for link building, regardless of relevancy – because those will not only not do you any good, but could also penalize you.
Watch Your Anchor Text – When it comes to your internal links, your anchor text is very important. The search engines place value on the links on your site, and pay particular attention to the anchor text you use for those links, so make sure you label them correctly. Using “click here” as anchor text for any link, let alone an important one, is a waste of a good link – it doesn’t tell the search engine anything important or useful to you. Always try to use your main keywords as anchor text when possible, and anything but “click here” (or variations thereof).
Link building is a long process that will take time to implement and maintain, but the results, when you do it correctly, are well worth all of the effort. Keep these SEO help tips in mind as you get started, and you’ll definitely be on the right track.
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