Q: How can I create a strategic link building plan for my website without the fear of getting penalized by Google?
A: You might have heard time and again about the “Link building is dead” theories, but link building is still alive. It is just that some of the old methods of link building have died. Google has never said links are dead, in fact it says something completely opposite. Google’s head of Search Spam, Matt Cutts, says Google has tried to exclude links from its algorithm in the past and the results were “much worse.”
So what you can do? You can’t approach a link farm and buy links. This might get your site potentially penalized because this method is dead. What you can do is hire someone with experience to create a strategic link acquisition plan for your website and help you implement it. In this way you can acquire natural links to your site through an effective link building campaign, and not through a link buying campaign.
A strategic link builder knows several ways to do this for you. The best thing is it will appear completely natural. However, at present this is a highly scrutinized area of SEO, so be careful while hiring someone to do the task for you.
Here are a few more link building strategies that you can employ:
- Rather than writing long blog posts you can create infographics and industry related checklists. Get them published on other blogs. Infographics always generate more backlinks and attract more visitors than blog posts.
- Create a great recruitment page- a page saying you are hiring. Submit it in community sites, forcing users to visit and share. This will also let you earn links from news sites that talk about outsourcing, job search, and employee management.
- In order to get links from non-competitors’ domain you can create a resource page listing their sites, partner with them to create a useful resource guide, include their content in your pitches and share their content in your social networks and email lists.
- Dive into communities if you want to do link building without content. You can also consider scholarships, sponsorships and broken link building.
- Find out which sites are using your content without linking to you. Reach them and ask them to link back to you.
- Fix broken links in your website and redirect those web pages to the right pages.
- Search for your content which has earned links in the past and update them accordingly.
These are some of the best ways you can improve your link building strategy without the fear of getting penalized by Google. Over time this will help you earn links form authoritative and relevant websites and blogs.
