Google Link Building Strategies

We have spoken many times about the importance of good SEO link building. For review, your rank on Google is determined by the words on your website and by how many other sites link to you. Your site must have keywords used in it in a natural way, so that Google can see that the site really is about the topic represented by the keywords. And you needs lots of others sites to link to you. So, many web masters work very hard to trade links with other sites and some even pay for links to their site. This post will review the 9 frequently used ways of link building and will evaluate which methods are best.

1. Paid Links – Very effective in building a link base, but very, very risky. You pay sites to link to you, but if you get caught by Google, your site might as well be abandoned!!
2. Link Trading – “I will link to you if you link me” Dangerous, worthless, and a waste of time. Better tactic is to have friends and partners link to you within the normal text of their site, but only when it makes sense. Don’t bother to have a French cooking site link to your car web site. All links must be natural and make sense.
3. Internal Links – These are links from within your own site, to the most important pages on the site. It has the advantage of helping Google find new information on your site and makes it clear to Google which pages are the most important. This is the easiest way to link build, but is frequently ignored by web masters. Good internal links are naturally part of the text, and not navigational.
4. Social Media Links – Links from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Many of these links are the infamous “NoFollow” type of links, but many still work and are worth the effort. Also, people will see your site on the social sites and traffic will result anyway. Do it.
5. Links from Directories – There is a high risk to using most directories – a risk that Google will discount the links and penalize you. Only Yahoo and DMOZ have any value at all, ignore the rest. All others can actually hurt your rank.
6. Blog Comment Links – It might appear that writing a comment on a blog and leaving your URL will help your link building. Unfortunately, almost all blogs these days are run with Wordpress or Blogspot, neither of which will pass any rank value to your site. They automatically set comments to the “NoFollow” state, which means you get no credit.
7. .Gov and .Edu Extensions – The best links you can get! If you can find these partners somehow, they will build your rank faster than anything else.
8. PR Links – Using PRWeb or PR Newswire still make sense and add value.
9. Link Baiting – Google actually recommends this one! This is the BEST way to build links. The process is to create great content that other people will want to copy and share with others. Find a way to make your site sticky, fun, and creative.