Pro Link Building Tips

Over the past couple of years, the way marketers and SEO professionals build links has totally changed.

Posting comments on blogs for a link back is now pointless, as all major blogging platforms – WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous have the nofollow tag on all comment links by default. This remove any of the pagerank juice flowing through to your site.

Link Exchanges are also no the best way to grow links, as you are losing and gaining pagerank at the same time – net effect: no much. Google has always warned again link exchanges especially to unrelated sites.

So how do we build links these days?

1. Compelling, Stimulating Content

You can’t just product unique content, it also has to be compelling and stimulating for the reader. You want your readers to be sharing your blog on social networks at a high frequency.

If they engage and ask questions this is also suggesting your content is thought provoking and valuable enough for their time.

2. Connect with your industry leaders

Whatever niche you work in, you want to connect with industry leaders of your field. Goto their blogs, leave comments, chat with them on social networks. If they know you and respect your position in the market this is a great start.

Just because you are competitors does not mean you can’t engage in a friendly dialogue.

Monitor what they discuss and if you produce something relevant to their link of business you may find they link through to you.

3. Focus on Linkable Content

Pictures, Videos, Infographics are the new trend.  Well they are not actually that new but these types of medium is much more interesting to your average internet user than a blob of text.

As part of your content generation strategy I encourage you to mix it up.

Don’t just post articles all week, see if  you can incorporate a video blog, or infographic.

Have a look at this Infograph we did on Social Media Growth Australia – 2011. This is obviously a valuable piece of information for many digital media/ social media and online professionals around Australia. As a result this article got many links and social sharing.

We also made another Infograph showing Facebook Stats in Australia – Feb 2012

As part of my own content strategy, I will be increasing my focus on more articles like this.

You will also notice at the bottom of every post I have a widget that has the HTML code to link to this article. Encouraging people to link to me. Whilst this does impact user experience, if done in a gentle and not majorly obvious way this helps get lots of fresh new links on a daily/weekly basis.

4. Social Bookmarking sites can still generate results

Don’t discount social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon. These sites can still get you thousands of views for the right piece of content. There is no way to magically know when this will happen but if you experiment one day you may notice a large amount of traffic coming through from one of these sites.

With such a mass number of users you are bound to find a few people who want to discuss it in more detail on their blog, possibly including a link back to your blog.

5. Social Media sharing can get you a number 1 search ranking

Google loves social, so much so they have spent probably tens of millions of dollars creating their own social network.

But Google can’t ignore Twitter of Facebook. If you have a piece of content that magically gets a huge amount of tweets and likes this can almost immediately get you a number1 ranking on Google. In this case, shares are like links!

So when do we get started?

Now.