This week, we have a post from my friend Dan Chaney about link building. I hope you’re doing that, as it’s still important to search. There are ways to do it that are better than others, and in this article, Dan has some really great tips:
6 Tips for Improving Your Link Building Campaign
Due to the vital role that link building plays in SEO, it’s important to create quality links and avoid ones that lead to sandboxing and other penalties. While the nature of link building is continually in flux, there are still numerous proven techniques that have worked for many websites. With this in mind, let’s go over 6 tips that can help improve your link building campaign and hopefully boost your ranking. 
1) Monitor Competitors
One of the best ways to get started involves checking out some of your most successful competitors who already have high ranking websites. If they have been able to reach the first page on Google, they must be utilizing some effective link building tactics. For this reason, it’s smart to check out their inbound links and search for other content they have published online including press releases, blog posts, social media posts, etc.
2) Stay Relevant
While it was sometimes possible to gain traction by creating irrelevant backlinks in a pre-Penguin world, things have changed. Ever since Google’s Penguin Update in 2012, it’s extremely important to create backlinks that are highly relevant to your niche. For example, if your website is about golf you wouldn’t want to have backlinks that come from a fashion website.
3) Quality is Key
In addition to relevancy, quality is of the utmost importance when it comes to a backlinking campaign. In fact, many websites that used spammy, low quality backlinks were penalized by Penguin and experienced a considerable loss of organic traffic as a result. For this reason, it’s usually best to stay away from things like buying thousands of links, or spinning articles and put them on low value directories.
4) Take Your Time
One mistake that many website owners and businesses make is creating too many backlinks over a short period of time. While it may seem that this would be beneficial, in reality it tends to have the opposite effect and can be detrimental to your campaign. In fact, this is one of the best ways to get sandboxed and have your rankings drop. Since effective backlinking has a natural flow, it’s important to be patient and gradually create backlinks over time.
5) Try Guest Posting
A great way to get backlinks while simultaneously driving large volumes of traffic to your website is through guest posting. This involves creating an insightful article that adds values to readers’ lives and asking a relevant blogger to post it to his site. Obviously you will need to include a link to your website at the end.
6) Create Press Releases
An additional technique that many website owners have seen success with is press releases. This typically consists of a 350 to 450 word article that highlights what your website or business has to offer. From there, you can distribute a press release the places like the Press Dispensary. Many times this can lead to an influx in traffic as well as improved rankings.
Dan is a blogger and internet marketer who relies on Who Is Hosting This.com to identify what host any website is using.
