Top 10 Link Building Tips

It's all about diversity - Link Diversity that is

10 (FREE) Link Building Tips

Here are 10 free link building tips. Read the full article for more information about each tip.

1. Take your time
2. Directory Listings
3. Natural Anchor Text
4. Keep good Neighbors
5. Mix it up
6. Relevance
7. New & Old
8. Don't go round promoting paid linking
9. Think long term
10. Deep Linking

Take your time - Building up links "naturally" is a good idea. Having 1,000 people link to your site overnight is an example of not-so-natural link building (there are some cases where this is legitimate, but you can bet Goolge will be checking for evidence one way or the other). As a word of caution you probably want to be aiming for no more then 500 links to your site in the month, but just remember it's not a race it's a marathon.

Directory Listings - It's good to have a variety of links. Of course having 99% of your links coming from directory listings probably isn't what you should be aiming for but there's no harm in building links for all areas of the web, some great examples include social networking sites, social bookmarking, press releases, forums, blogs & blog comments

Natural Anchor Text - If every single one of your 500 links are for <insert heavily optimized keyword phrase here> it can look a little odd. It's usually best to mix things up a bit, include some variations in your phrases, it will help generate traffic for a wide range of keywords, including long tail keywords (this also helps because you won't have all your eggs in the one basket). Every now and then throw in some anchor text that's a little bit different, the link diversity will help make sure you're growth is seen as natural instead of spammy or automated.

Keep good Neighbors - Linking to bad parts of the web can hurt your reputation. Places like Adult Entertainment, Online Gambling or Pharmaceutical aren't the best places to link too, especially if they're not really relevant. Try not to exchange links with this part of the Internet too, particularly if you're site has nothing to do with theirs.

Mix it up - There are so many aspects of link diversity but one good bit of advice is to make sure you get links from sites that have variing page rank. As you could imagine if every single one of your links are from PR4 sites that can look very unnatural.

Relevance - Getting links from pages that are relevant to yours is an important ingredient in SEO. Contextual links (links within a paragraph of text, or a blog post specially themed around your site/target keyword) are great, particularly when they come from a site dedicated to your niche. You don't need to do this exclusively as it's good to have links from all sorts of places but make sure you have a good portion of links that are actually relevant to your niche.

New & Old - Try to ensure you've got links from both new sites & established ones.

Don't go round promoting paid linking - Google really doesn't like this idea. If you have banner advertisements you may want to add a NoFollow to the links. Putting the words "sponsors" or "advertisement" around your links should probably be avoided too.

Think long term - Your goal when obtaining links should be to get ones that stick around. Paying for links via a subscription service will end up being very costly as you'll have to pay to that link for the rest of your life. The moment you stop paying the link and all its benefits goes away. Chase links that are permanent and will give you value for a lifetime and always think about your long term position.

Deep Linking - Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Linking to other parts of your website is important, and it's called deep linking. When you build links to internal pages you'll gain more trust and that will flow through to your homepage as well. Of course this doesn't mean diluting your efforts by link building to every single page on your website, there does need to be some strategy involved.