Link building is one of the important techniques of SEO. This is because it is one of the major factors for how Google ranks Web pages. Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. There are several ways to do it. While some of these methods are good and can increase your rank; others are bad and of low quality and may lead to the opposite. They may even lead to penalizing your website by Google.
Anchor text
One of the strongest methods that the search engines consider when ranking pages is the actual text used by the linking page to talk about content in your page. This is known as “Anchor text”. Although this method is an important and strong way to link to your page, which optimizes your rank at Google search, you should not over use these links. This means that you should not repeat the linking words many times without actual need in the context. It is really great that people write about you and link to your website, but this should be done and the links should be created in a natural way. If you add so many commercial keywords to the anchor text, this is not at all natural and may put you in trouble.
Page quality
Another factor that is taken into account is the quality of the page sending the link. Links sent from high quality and trusted pages count more in boosting rankings by search engines. Thus when using anchor text, we should determine which anchor text to use and decide which page to point at.
Social media
Social Sharing is also another method for link building. In the past few years, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have exploded with the amount of content shared on it for business. Links shared on the social media are also detected by the search engine, although they are treated differently than the other types of links.
The main benefit of the social links is that they are one of the factors that Google takes in consideration in their algorithm. This results in higher ranking for your website. Having good social sites also encourages people to interact with you, which hopefully encourages more people to link to your website. When choosing the social network to engage with, you should put in consideration your industry and your target market. For example, you shouldn’t put big effort in a popular site that your customers won’t visit much.
Web directories and blogs
Listing in web directories and blogs is another important means of linking. Adding your website to a web directory or linking to your website in a blog will surely increase your rank on search engines. Still this linking must be also used with caution. Your website shouldn’t be just listed in any directory, Some directories don’t provide any real value and Google has excluded them from its search results. You should thus choose the directory carefully to provide useful information to your customers. This directory should be also relevant to your industry.
As for blogs, you should take care not to make a blog with only one post and one link to your site. If you want to have a blog, then you need to keep it alive by writing posts on regular basis. You should also be focusing on your industry and your clients’ needs in your blog. If you are participating in a discussion on a blog, you can share a link as long as it is relevant to your business and the blog. Don’t put your link only as signature in those comments.
All these methods may take some time till they show their results in SEO. But they are high quality methods which will not make your website blacklisted or marked as spam by Google search engines.