Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - 1. Link Building Basics

I’ve shown you some of the best ways to research links. Now, let’s look at some of the basics when it comes time to requesting those links.

I thought I would do this because, as I was reviewing past articles on link building strategies, a thought occurred to me: The tips I have provided are more general in nature.  Therefore, I have decided to write a sort of ‘how to’ article. Only, in this one I will give you some of the things you should not do when performing link building.

In the past few articles I’ve explained some of the techniques one could use to search out and request links.

But now it’s time to go back to basics and look at some of the things you shouldn’t do as you are link building.

For example, we’ve already discussed how building links too fast may not necessarily be a bad thing, but there are other things to consider when link building.

For one, natural link building tends to happen to all of your site, not just your home page.

Therefore, when you are performing link building for your site, be sure to request links to the entire site, not just the home page.

There is an upside to this, however, and that is building links to the whole site is generally easier as you can build topical links to sub pages more easily than the home page.

This is because most sites cover a variety of topics.  As such, you could build links to the home page, as well as product pages and information pages from a variety of sources.

I can’t stress enough how important the growth in links appears.  That means ensuring that links to internal pages also grows at a natural rate.

Therefore, when you are doing link building, ensure that some of the links point to the home page but that others also point to internal pages.

Also, when you are requesting links, ensure that you randomize the link text.  Don’t request hundreds of links with the same text.  In fact, make it completely unique if possible.

For example, some people like to use a generic phrase and swap out keywords.  While this will work, it’s not the most effective tactic.

Think of it from the search engine’s point of view:  What are they going to say if all of a sudden your site has several more links with the exact same, or even similar linkage text?

What I prefer to do is have a few different generic pieces as well as an assortment of keywords.  Then you can randomize your requests by mixing up the more generic phrases with the preferred keywords.

This type of link building is much harder to spot by the engines.

Another tip if you are doing manual link submissions is to use an email from the domain for which you are requesting links.

Many times some directories will not accept link requests from webmail based email addresses like Yahoo! MSN or Gmail.

Usually what you can do is set up a non-primary account from your domain.  For example, my name is Rob so I may set up a bob@mydomain.com email address that I would use for link requests.  That way the “bob” email address would be subject to any spam I may get from sites that redistribute my email address and believe me there are sites out there like that.  This way, my main email address remains untouched which means I won’t have to deal with what some webmasters would do with the address.

Finally, and this should seem pretty obvious, is to track your efforts.  Set up a spreadsheet to track any submissions you’ve made, any that are pending and those which have been accepted.  This sheet is also a great place to keep track of upcoming requests you’d like to make.

What’s great about maintaining a spreadsheet is that it can help automate some of your link building tasks.

For example, with excel and other spreadsheet programs you can “concatenate” cell contents.  That means you could use the spreadsheet to help you randomize your link requests as I explained above.

In other words, you could put the generic phrases in one column and your keywords in another column and then concatenate the columns to provide you with a large selection of anchor text to use when submitting link requests.

What I’ve shown you here today are just a few of the most basic link building tips.  There will be more to come in the days and weeks ahead, but for now, keep what I’ve told you here in mind.  They can save you a lot of time and frustration.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article