Google’s 8 Tips For Link Building
By Anna Johnson on July 6th, 2010If you’re like most Internet marketers, you want to impress Google, right? In other words, you want to get a higher search ranking. Well, one of the keys to doing so is to attract back-links. If so, you’ll probably want to know what Google itself recommends in terms of building links…
Well, a recent blog post by Kaspar Szymanski, a Google search quality strategist in Dublin, Ireland offers some tips for those of us seeking back-links. If you’ve been involved in search engine optimization (SEO) for any length of time these recommendations may not be Earth-shattering, but it’s useful to hear what Google has to say on the topic…
Here are Google’s 8 tips for getting back-links:
1. Get involved in your community
Participate in online forums and blogs in order to build a reputation that attracts people (and links) to your site.
2. Offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content
If you offer great content, people will want to recommend it to others e.g. by linking to it.
3. Address your users’ issues or problems
Create value for your user base by publishing content e.g. tutorials, videos, research, etc that helps your target market solve their problems or issues.
4. Use humor
Creating humorous, entertaining content is liable to be shared, although this may not be appropriate for your site or useful as a long-term, sustainable link-building strategy.
5. Do not buy links or randomly exchange links
According to Szymanksi, buying or randomly exchanging links “are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.”
6. Only submit your site to web directories that are “on topic, moderated, and well structured.”
“Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes,” says Szymanksi.
7. Adapt what has been successful for similar sites
Consider similar sites in other markets to see what has worked for them that might also work for your site.
8. Include social sharing devices
Make it easy for visitors to share your content or refer your site to others by including icons, buttons, etc that allow them to bookmark, Tweet, Like or otherwise share your site with others.
Source: Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, “Quality links to your site,” June 21, 2010
