However, link building isn’t easy and it’s getting harder to get those all important quality links. This has meant that some ‘SEO’ firms and website owners have resorted to using underhand techniques to gain links.

In the past, it was more quantity of links over quality, but the tables have been turning over the last few years with quality being far more important. Even more so since Google started rolling out their ‘Panda’ updates. But to gain those all important links, many paid link networks cropped up where you could pay to have links pointing to your site, which also contained the anchor text specified by you. What is contained in the ‘anchor text’ of a link is also important as it helps contribute towards rankings for those keywords. So although the link itself helps, it’s the words contained within that link that help even more. If you’re in a particularly competitive industry, such as mobile phones, then you might want your link anchor text to read, ‘Samsung mobile phones’ or something like that. These paid link networks would do this for you along with a short article or blog post. These sites aren’t intended for people to visit but built solely to manipulate the search results – which means spam! 

Having recently been digging around whilst working on a new project, I found links on sites such as these:

http://www.that-forum.com/

http://www.sabdankur.com/

http://jimidolezal.com/

Take a look and make your own mind up as to the quality of these sites! (You’ll need to copy and paste the link into your browser as these aren’t live links).

This is when link building becomes spam building

The content of these sites is appalling, in some cases making no sense at all, and all for the sake of a link. This type of link building is very high risk, firstly as it goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines and secondly, getting caught could mean a penalty slapped on the site. That means loss of rankings and business. Since Google rolled out the Panda update, they’re clamping down on these paid link networks, content farms and link farms to the point that within the last couple of weeks some have now shut down as all the links have been discounted. If you’ve been using these techniques, it’s been a complete waste of time and money. You can read more about it here on SitePro News: The Death of Paid Link Networks.

If you’ve outsourced link building to a third party, then you need to be clear about what techniques they’re using. Ask them which sites the links are on, how they’re obtaining links. Don’t take any excuses if these questions aren’t answered satisfactorily. You don’t want your site associated with any spammy link sites and if a penalty is slapped on the site, it’s a long and difficult process to get it removed. It’s also worth bearing in mind that sites like these often change hands, and you don’t know whose hands the site may end up in. Your link could end up being on a site you certainly wouldn’t want your business associated with.

There’s a fine line between link building and spam building, just make sure you’re on the right side of it!

What experiences have you had with link building? Have you ever been tempted to submit your site to link networks in an attempt to boost rankings?

Image: Spam by pandemia, on Flickr

Link Chain by andydr, on Flickr

This post relates a little to my post a couple of weeks ago ‘Is Spam Here to Stay?‘. Since then, The New York Times revealed that a leading American retailer, JC Penney was using paid, spam backlinks to inflate their rankings, & it was working for them. You can read more about it here: The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.

What’s a bit of a coincidence is that last week I was doing some research for a client, reviewing some competitors’ backlinks and they all had a similar theme – spam! I was researching the office furniture industry and I reviewed the backlinks of several sites. I was surprised at how many of them had very poor quality links from shoddy looking sites, some totally unrelated to their industry and some had obviously paid for links. What stood out was that the anchor text of some of these links included their main target keywords, in this case ‘office furniture’ or similar. The reason I was researching these sites was that they all ranked very well for the target keywords, which are also quite competitive. Most of these sites had thousands of links pointing to their site as well.

Gaining good quality links isn’t easy, although I pointed out a few easier ways of gaining links in my post last week, 5 Quick & Easy Link Building Tips. (Econsultancy also recently wrote an article on the same subject ‘51 essential link building tips‘). To get thousands of links like these sites had, the sites had to be using link farms or automated link building to get that many links on low quality sites.

This makes me ask two questions:
Why get links from such low quality sites?
Do they really care which sites links to them?

To answer the first question, the only reason they wanted these links was to inflate their link popularity and boost rankings. A large part of the way search engines rank sites is incoming links or ‘link popularity’ (however, usually it’s quality over quantity), so doing this would help them to rank highly for their search terms, particularly if the anchor text of the link contained their target keyword. Links on these sites certainly wouldn’t drive any traffic as it’s highly unlikely anyone would ever visit them, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t stay on these sites for long. So these links certainly weren’t for the traffic!

And do they care where their links come from? Obviously not! Brand reputation wasn’t even considered when these links were obtained. I have many fussy clients who wouldn’t want their sites anywhere near the low quality sites these links were on. However, in fairness, some brands probably have no clue about the link building tactics their ‘seo’ company may be using. I’ll save that for another post.

It seems that for a lot of websites, rankings have been more important than the tactics used to gain them or their brand reputation, clearly demonstrated by the fact they didn’t care what type of site their website was appearing on.

Hopefully Google’s new clamp down on spam will demonstrate that using these tactics isn’t going to get you very far, and can damage your reputation in the long run!

Have you ever been tempted to list your website somewhere for the sake of a link rather than the quality of the website?

1. Business Directories
There are plenty of directories out there to submit your site to (some are better than others), but this is a great place to start with link building. It’s worth researching directories that serve your industry sector and also local directories if you serve a particular geographic area. Some good ones to look at are:
TouchLocal
FreeIndex
City Local
Open Directory (DMOZ)
Applegate
Kellysearch
Bizwiki

2. Competitor Backlinks
You can find out where your competitors have gained their links from which can help a huge amount with research, saving time. To find your competitors links, the Yahoo Site Explorer is a good place to start. Type in your competitor web address and click on ‘inlinks’. You’ll be presented with a list of websites, which can also be downloaded into a spreadsheet if you use the ‘export results to TSV’ link.

Not only will this give you an idea of where your competitors may be gaining links from, but also an insight into what online marketing activities they’re doing. At the same time, don’t forget to review which sites link back to your own!

3. Blogs / Articles
Writing blog posts and articles which show off your expertise is another way of gaining links, which will also be more in context of what you do. If you’ve previously written articles, then work out how they could be recycled to use on article submission sites, guest articles on sites within your industry sector which may be looking for content, or even as a guest blogger on a blog that may serve your target market. There are usually quite a lot of opportunities when you start looking! Some of the better article submission sites include:
Ezine Articles
Hubpages
Squidoo
Articles Base

4. Social Networks
With the ever growing popularity of social networks, getting your content shared can also contribute towards the ‘link popularity’ of your website. The search engines are now taking activity on social networks into consideration in the way they rank sites (even if it’s not a large part of their algorithm currently), however, if your content is shared by more influential people, this can really help. Just make sure that what you share is good quality information! For more on this, please read our post ‘Social Media Does Affect Search Engine Rankings‘

5. PR
If you’re embarking on a PR campaign for your products or services, make the most of the press coverage you get. Most ‘offline’ press articles are also put online and this is where a live link to your site would really help. Don’t forget to ask if the publication forgets to do this for you! If you’re sending out press releases, then make use of some of the press release sites out there too which include:
PR Web
PR Fire
PressBox

For more link building tips on Savvy Marketers, there’s a few posts worth reading in our Link Building category.

What link building tips can you share? If you’ve done anything that’s really helped spread the word and gain links for your business, then please add your comment here!

However, there are still companies out there offering very sub-standard ‘link building’ services and it’s important that you don’t fall for these tactics. Any company who can guarantee a certain number of links is definitely doing something dodgy as how could you possibly guarantee gaining good quality links? Sounds great on the surface that by paying a fee (which can be expensive) you’ll gain xxx number of links, which will help push up your rankings. The reality is that many of these links appear on unrelated low quality sites or ‘link farms’, are gained through automated emails to website owners or are temporarily added to sites and then removed. Not the best way of gaining those ‘quality’ links!

I don’t offer a link building service to my clients per se as I know I can’t get the quality links they need. I may do some research to find appropriate sites in their sector, such as directories or information portals that accept links (sometimes paid as well) and submit the site for them. The idea is that they’ll gain some targeted traffic as these sites are relevant to their business. However, there is a limit to what I can do in this area without spending hours researching sites in the hope I may be able to gain a link from them – not something many small businesses are prepared to pay for.

It’s important to remember that link building is not instant and has to be done over a long period of time. Just concentrating on a few industry directories or portals isn’t enough either. By making your site the best it can be, you can encourage links naturally as people link to your site because they like it! Social media campaigns will also go a long way to help you gain quality links as you build relations with people online. Any publicity or PR you get can will make a major contribution towards gaining high quality links and targeted traffic to boot.

So is link building worth the effort? Yes, if you go about it strategically, but whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of quantity over quality, however tempting it may be to get as many links as early on as you can. Low quality links won’t make any difference to your rankings, so it’s this tactic that really isn’t worth the effort.

This post was inspired by a recent conversion I had with someone who had used a company promising to gain a specified number of links only to find that they ended up on unrelated sites to her business.

What experiences have you had trying to gain links to your website? Please share your thoughts and comments!

The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer:  Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.

By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?

If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.

A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:

“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk

(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)

You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.

Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.

A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.

It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!

However, it doesn’t mean you should give up altogether, but means you need to be much more targeted about who you approach and how you ask them. What’s important is to give other website owners a good reason to link to you and your efforts should be a little more successful.

Before you begin though, make sure your site is worthy of being linked to! If you’ve not updated it for a while, or still have areas under construction, then make sure you deal with these things first as you don’t want to put people off from linking to you because of a shoddy website.

You’ll then need to do some research into the type of sites you’d like links from, and possibly wouldn’t mind linking back to (after all, most other businesses you approach will probably want the link reciprocated). If you’re a physiotherapist, the type of sites who may want to link or partner with you are alternative therapists (perhaps a reflexologist or acupuncturist), personal trainers, local gyms or sports clubs etc. Not only would you like them to link back to your site, but these businesses could be potential sources of leads.

Then prepare some short descriptions of your site to send over to the website within your email, you need to make it easy for them to put your link up, so don’t expect them to think of a description for you, it probably won’t be what you’d like anyway.

When approaching the website, try and get the website owners name if possible and make the email a little more personal. Things you might like to include are a bit about your site and what services or products you provide. That you very much like their site and have perhaps already included it on your site (e.g on your links page). You then need to include the description of your site you’ve prepared and your website url.

Give them a good reason as to why they should link to you, perhaps that you could be a good source of leads for each other. Finally end the email and let them know that it isn’t an automated request and they won’t be added to any email lists.

You may never get a response from your email, but that’s just part of link building, so don’t take it personally. Whatever you do though, record who you’ve emailed and when, so that you remember who you’ve approached, and may want to repeat the email a few weeks later. As long as you emphasise what’s in it for them, you should get a much better response than many of the automated requests out there.

For more ideas on link building, you can read a post I wrote last year: Link Building Ideas

4. Interact Online
The web is becoming more and more interactive, so you need to start interacting online to get your name out there and find people who are interested in your products. Networking online is proving to be very effective for many businesses, and the best thing is that most of it is free, it just requires time. Start by commenting on blogs, find groups to join in Facebook or if that doesn’t appeal to you, forums are a good place to answer questions.

5. Encourage Conversions on Your Website
Once you get more visitors to your site, you need to make sure that they’re buying from you. If you want to increase your conversion rate, there are a few things you can try:

i. Create a short usability test for some friends or family who don’t know your site. Ask them what they think of your site and to perform some basic tasks. See where improvements could be made.

ii. Make sure your web pages have strong calls to action and visitors know what to do on your site or where they should go.

iii. Add fresh content regularly so visitors know the site is up to date and the company is proactive. Add news, product reviews, testimonials, tips. Anything of interest to visitors. Even changing images regularly can make a big difference.

iv. If writing sales copy isn’t your forte, then employ someone who can, as good copy can make a real difference to the success of a website.

6. Keep on Top of Your Competitors
As part of your online marketing, you should also be checking regularly to see what your competitors are up to. Are they advertising via PPC or other websites? Where are they gaining links from? Are they getting good PR coverage, and are they prolific social networkers? Have they recently updated their website and what have they included? All of this information can help you improve your online marketing and make sure you keep up with them or take the opportunity to overtake them!

All of these activities I’ve posted about in the last week should help your campaign in the run up to Christmas so that you benefit from increased visibility online and increased sales.

Gaining quality links into a site isn’t easy – it’s very time consuming, you may even lose the will to live with it, but it needs to be included into the day to day activities of promoting your site. If you’ve been trying to gain links unsuccessfully for a while, then here’s a few resources which may help make your life easier:

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity – from SEO Book

50 Ideas to Kick Start Your Link Building Strategy – from Marketing Minefield

8 Tips to Get Domain Diversity – from SEOmoz

Headsmacking Tip #1: Link Requests in Order Confirmation Emails – also from SEOmoz

5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas – from Search Engine Watch

Q&A: A Few Things You Need to Know About Links – from Search Engine Guide

There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link – from Search Engine Land

Hopefully the above links will give you lots of new ideas, but if you’ve got any great ideas that have worked well for you, drop us a note as we’re always keen to hear of ways to successfully gain links.

One of the reasons why I think many businesses don’t tackle link building is because of the confusion that surrounds it. Some of the business owners I speak to get confused about links on their own site pointing to other sites and links pointing back to their own website.

When it comes to adding links on your own website that point to other sites, you can link to whichever site you want to link to, as long as you’re happy to list that site on your website (so don’t just link to any old site if you get link requests, only if you’re happy to do so). However, including links to other sites from yours won’t help with your ‘link popularity’ (search engine rankings through quality links), or help drive traffic to your website.

Gaining those all important links has become increasingly difficult over the last couple of years. In the past, web directories such as DMOZ (Open Directory) and Yahoo used to be great places to gain links from, but these links are becoming less and less valuable, so it’s not really worth the time and effort of submitting your site to the many free directories that are out there.

When starting out building links to your site, think about your target market and where they might be. List the websites that are prominent in your industry and may have somewhere on the site you could gain a link from. Are there forums and social networking sites within your industry? Make sure you’re listed on those. Approach sites which offer complementary products or services to yours – they can be great places for links and drive targeted traffic. Doing some PR? Links from PR campaigns can be extremely valuable not only in terms of the quality of the links, but the traffic too.

So before you start submitting your website to all those free directories you find (and have probably never heard of!), really think about who you’re marketing to, so that you don’t waste time gaining links from sites that not only will probably never be found, but will send no traffic to your website.