Building fresh, high quality and relevant links to your website is becoming more important than ever now and it will have a very positive effect on your SEO. A search engine sees a link as a vote – it is someone else vouching for your authority and the quality of your blog post. When you have a lot of “votes” the search engine decides that you are relevant, important and trusted – so your site will be assigned a higher value and will get better rankings in the search engine results page. Of course links are not everything when it comes to SEO, but they make a big difference.
When you are building links, it is important to have a number of different types of links in your profile – so that it is as diverse as possible. This will help you to attract traffic from a range of different sources, as well as ensuring that your links don’t look suspicious because they are all coming from one source. If a search engine sees this, they will assume that you are cheating and they will punish your rankings accordingly.
So what types of links should you have in your portfolio in order to improve your SEO? Here are some of the best opportunities out there for building a diverse and effective link portfolio.
Social linking can be one of the best tools out there for building links. When you use it properly, your social presence can be employed to boost your SEO strategy so that you can earn quality backlinks to your website.
You can’t force social links; you can only create high quality, relevant and engaging content and then share it. If enough people are interested in it – they will share the content as well and this will build up links. This is a slow and steady method of building links, but it can be very valuable and natural way of using optimising rankings.
Branding is also a very important part of growing your business. Developing your brand and building a reputation will help you to bring traffic, exposure and potential leads to your company. When you are contributing content to websites such as guest posts or article directories, make sure that you use your brand name in the author bio section.
Remember, you are focusing on your brand, rather than on keywords. Search engines actually favour brands and will pay more attention to them rather than just keywords. This is why it is important to focus on expanding your brand’s reputation and building authority.
When you are building links, you will want to have a combination of both follow and no follow links for your blog. What is the difference? A “do follow” link is a normal style of hyperlink that “counts” as a link according to Google and will allow link juice to flow to the website being linked to – boosting its page rank. However, a no follow link doesn’t count as a point in the favour of the page and doesn’t boost PageRank.
You might be thinking that you shouldn’t even bother building up no-follow links, because they will give you no SEO benefit. However, just because they don’t offer you any link value doesn’t mean that they are worthless. A no follow link can still provide you with valuable referral traffic. If you make a very relevant forum post or a well-placed blog comment – this can send a lot of traffic to your website. For example, if you leave a well thought out and relevant blog comment, it will be clicked on by the readers of the blog because it pertains to the discussion.
Did you know that if you have links to your website in your Twitter profile, other websites that source Twitter for your bio and data will end up putting the links in their listing as well? For example, when Listorious or Klout automatically create a bio for you, they will take the links right from your Twitter profile. This is very easy to do, will only take five minutes and is a great way to automatically build links to your website.
These are just a few of the many great opportunities out there to build a diverse portfolio of links for your website. Remember, when you are building links they should be high quality, from a diverse range of sources, relevant to your website and reflective of your authority and expertise in your particular niche.
