7 Ways to Keep Your Link Profile Natural
SEO is always changing, but even as algorithms change and new ranking factors appear, many core practices stay the same. It is these core practices that can help your site stand the test of time, resulting in long-lasting search engine rankings and a steady flow of organic search traffic for years to come.
Here are seven ways to help ensure your site will always pass the constant tests of search engines.
1. Vary Anchor Text
You may be focusing on a few keywords such as “business cards”, but always vary your anchor text. Use longtail keywords, your brand keywords and even obscure keywords for your anchor text such as “visit them here”. People don’t always link back to sites using the perfect keywords pointing to the perfect URL, and search engines know that.
2. Avoid Spammy Sites
Avoid adult sites, gambling sites, auto blogs, very new sites, blogs that haven’t been updated in years and so on. When possible, try and stick to sites in your niche and most importantly, avoid sites that obviously sell links, especially unrelated ones.
3. Quality Over Quantity
Always go for a few quality links over hundreds or even thousands of low quality ones. Excessive amounts of links acquired in a short amount of time from poor sources such as blog comments and article directories send bad signals to search engines.
4. Focus on Your Brand
Building a strong brand with a great product or service is an easy way to get links and social votes naturally. People simply like recommending things they love and Google has been putting an emphasis and showing authority brands people “love” in the search results more.
5. Be Social
Social votes are becoming more important for search engine rankings. Get social votes on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ from real sources to various pages on your website such as your home page, social profiles and blog posts.
6. Avoid Patterns
Search engines are great at finding patterns, so avoid things such as getting all of one kind of link, submitting 5 articles exactly every week or creating lots of mini sites to get backlinks to a main website that can easily be tracked backed to you.
7. Timing
When you start a linkbuilding campaign, try to time it with other online marketing promotions such as PPC, banner ads and social media. These increases in traffic can help justify any new backlinks that may appear, especially if in large quantities.
Keep your links and link profile as natural as possible and you will be better able to stand the storm coming from any algorithm changes.
Good tips indeed, the most important, the clue is to think what is natural and what is not natural, and try to create links that clearly seem for search engines natural. If you can keep doing this, you will rank always good.
Paul recently posted..Posicionamiento web en Google Shopping
Nice guide on natural linkbuidling, but there is one more thing that many people tend to forget.
And that’s actually making the natural linkbuilding, many webmasters forget that linkbuiling also includes links from forums, normal websites (not blogs), articles and also links with the “Nofollow” tag.
And it’s the last one many tries to avoid like the plague, because it doesn’t give as much linkjuice.
Another thing I have found that can give indirect traffic and links, are if you share others post on twitter and other social sites. They tend to do the same, thus giving you backlinks and at the same time reaching out to other users that might share you links and so on.
Jimmy recently posted..http://www.valutakurserne.dk – PR.3
I am keeping my profile simple by focusing on its contents and avoiding too much links on it. Your tips are very useful. Thanks for sharing such a valuable post, keep up the good work.
James recently posted..Forex
Gino,
Do you think it is possible to leave too many blog comments in too short of time frame if you are just blogging normally (even if you are a really active blogger/commenter) ? Or, do you think that only applies to black hat software automation? Any idea on a number that would be considered a tipping point?
Ted recently posted..Google Algorithm Is My Rubiks Cube
Yes Cristian you MUST vary your anchor text. If you don’t, it is easy for search engines to tell you are trying to game them. There are even some tools you can use to see what your keyword anchor text ratio is for all your inbound links.
Gino Orlandi recently posted..11 SEO Tips for 2011
Solid tips. I never though we need to vary our anchors or don’t target them exactly as the keywords used. But it actually makes sense. If search engines thinks its all natural, ranks will go up.
Cristian Balau recently posted..Google Analytics Real Time Reports
Your tips are very useful. I am keeping my profile simple by focusing on its contents and avoiding too much links on it. I am very social for business purposes and this is one way for me to learn more about getting my site’s rank.
Items number 2 and 3 are two of the most important factors for avoiding issues with link building campaigns. Building them too fast, especially on new sites (sites that have existed less than 6 months) is a pretty quick way to ensure your site will receive a less than favorable review.
This is interesting tips of making the link profile more natural. In making link profile, I was advised to minimize the links and focus on the topic that I was usually dealing. I was also advised to remove the blogroll so that the website would look clean. I definitely avoid adult sites and gambling sites because it could affect my advertisements. Thanks for sharing the links.
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