Link Building Following Panda and Penguin

It is clear to anyone who understands something about SEO that since the latest big algorithm updates by Google; link building had to change its face. Old methods that used to work great seem now to not only be useless but actually cause harm to your promoted site. So what can you do in order to stay in business in this new reality?

Here are some tips for how you can check yourself, as well as your competitors and work through this setback into a new and better position in Google’s search results.

BI is everything

Researching incoming links to your site and to competitors is the best way to start. If you think about it, learning from those who managed to stay ranked high and comparing them with those who lost their rank would give you a pretty good picture of what changes you need to do to get back to high ranks.

My personal favorite tools are MajesticSEO.com and CognitiveSEO.com. The first gets you elaborated information about incoming links to a site and the second takes all that information and arranges it according to different segments like – IP, content category, inbound and outbound links, image as opposed to text links and the list goes on.

All of this will help you build a new link profile to your site with obvious goals and a step by step link building strategy. If CongnitiveSEO.com is too expensive for you and you know your way around Excel, you can get the same results by combining the free SEO for Excel tool with some useful macros and functions. I’m not familiar with any free alternative for Majestic though.

While you’re building your links, the main thing to have in mind is – Keep things natural. These following guidelines will help get the general picture of what this means:

1. Diverse your anchors

If you think about it, it just doesn’t make sense that people who are linking to you will use the same anchor text over and over again. Try combining in your link profile long tails, call to action phrases, domain and brand mentioning, click here, this site etc. Also Read : Backlink Building : Guide

2. Diverse your landing pages

The days when you’d have one landing page per a group of words are over. Linking to different pages with the same words gives a more natural appearance. Plus, if you have links to only few selected pages, it reflects badly on your domain authority.

3. Divers your link sources

Don’t be afraid of some ‘nofollow’ links. Try getting links from forum posts, blog comments, social sites and of course, other relevant sites. If it’s done naturally and is kept relevant it will improve your overall appearance to the search bots.

4. Take your time

Don’t build thousands of links in one day through automatic tools. In these days it’s mostly a waste of your money and can actually harm your site. Also read : Effective Backlink Strategies for SEO

5. Use images

Don’t limit yourself to just text links. Images are also a great way to get some link juice, plus, they help in marketing your site. You can use Google images, Pinterest, Flickr and many other platforms to share your images on.

6. Choose sources that can bring real traffic

Your link will be worth a lot more if it will generate real traffic to your site. Other than the obvious advantage of bringing more traffic to your site, the fact that these people are actually clicking on a link and browsing through your site makes the link seem more relevant to the content from which it’s linked and therefor a natural looking link.

So we went over how you can get information for building a new and effective link profile and we’ve covered some of the basic guidelines to keep things seem natural when implementing that profile. The last important thing to mention about link building is the ongoing work – keep track of all of your work and learn from it.

Once you’ll start implementing your new link building strategy you’ll see that nothing is set on stone. The profile will need to be changed according to new algorithm changes, competitors’ actions and your own domain stat. For a while it will seem like an endless loop, but once you’ll get your domain to safe grounds, things will get a lot steadier and easier. Do you know more tips to link building? Share with us via comments below.