The Art of Link Building – The SEO Book Every Site Owner Should Read
Published by Kyle Healey at Smashwords
The Art of Link Building By Kyle J. Healey
Introduction
Getting
links to your website is important as you probably know. Not only
does it bring traffic to your site directly, a good backlink strategy
will enable you to rank well in the major search engines. This will
allow you to accumulate organic, targeted and ready to buy traffic,
which in turn become customers. A "backlink" is when
another site links to yours.
In this book we will dive
into link building for small businesses and white hat sites. Real,
legit, online businesses will grow and succeed faster by applying the
tips in this book, I can guarantee it.
First we'll take a look
at some key concepts that will help you understand the rest of the
book. Then I'll go over some common pitfalls to make sure your mind
is in the right state to understand the next part, the methods. In
the methods section I will briefly go over many ways to build links
naturally and ethically for your small business.
Some
Important Concepts:
There
are a number of ideas repeated throughout this text that you will
notice I focus on. Some of those principles and ideologies are listed
below. This will also help you gain a better understanding of all the
actual methods I go into, as opposed to just blindly doing what I say
without actually knowing why. The basics of SEO typically remain the
same, while the nuances change on a weekly basis.
Be
Natural
A
re-occurring theme in this book is being natural. What I mean by
being natural is having a natural link profile, a site that looks
like the links pointing to it are because it's a high value site, and
the links occurred naturally from other people on the web, to share
that value. A link profile is the overall big picture of every single
link that is pointing to your site - ideally you'll want to have
links coming from several different sources, which looks
natural.
Having a natural link profile is an art form and I
will teach you how to do it. The last thing you want to do is be the
opposite of natural, clearly manipulative. Being obviously
manipulative and dropping easy links as fast and furious as you can
is a method used successfully only in the past, and it's a short
lived glory when the method does work. This book is about building a
quality web presence, one that will attract links naturally - even if
you are furiously nudging it along.
Anchor
Text
Anchor
text is the actual text used to link to your website. Most of you
know what an anchor text is, and the importance of it. In the example
<a href="www.xyzwidgets.com">Blue Widgets</a>,
"Blue Widgets" is the anchor text. The more instances you
have of your anchor text linking to your site throughout the web from
quality sites, the more chance you have for ranking of that term - in
general.
It's not always that easy, however, because
there are plenty of variables that need to be considered. The first
and most obvious thing to consider here is that the quality of the
pages you are getting your anchor text from is very important. If you
comment spam a bunch of low value pages, the low value will be passed
on to you. Even if you rank temporarily, this method will almost
certainly get your site penalized in the future. This concept can be
compared to the old saying "you are who your friends are".
In SEO, your friends are your link partners, both who you are linking
to, and those who are linking to you.
Varying
Anchor Text: Varying
your anchor text is of an utmost importance. You don't want the same
"Blue Widgets" anchor text for every single link pointing
to your site, because it simply doesn't look natural. You will look
like an amateur SEO trying to manipulate the engines and likely will
not rank anywhere as close to as you had envisioned. There are many
rookies in the SEO game that get burned by this method and learn the
hard way.
The solution to this problem is by varying
your anchor text. What this entails is using several different
relevant anchor texts when collecting your links around the web.
"Cool Blue Widgets" "Best Blue Widgets", "Kyle's
Site", and "http://www.xyzwidgets.com"> are all
varying anchor text staying with our example, and clearly would show
a more natural linking profile then if each link pointing to us said
"Blue Widgets".