Last Thursday, Search Engine Watch published an interview with Neil Patel, founder of KISSMetrics. Although the video focuses on many well-known best practices, it’s a great revisit to extremely effective, white hat SEO link building initiatives. As one of the most ongoing efforts done to manage and improve SEO, the importance of link building should not be overlooked and should have a strategy of its own. Long gone are the days of buying hundreds of low quality links in hopes to rank high in organic search. Here is a quick recap, as well as the video, that will help jump start those links in 2013. The theme? Quality, Quality, Quality!
My Top 3 Take-Aways
1. Quality over Quantity
Remember what I said about purchasing hundreds of links? This is exactly that. Focus on gathering a few great links from highly visible, trusted sites that generate a lot of interest and traffic. Locate these sites by searching for your targeted keywords and start contacting the top 50 sites, to start.
2. Quality Guest Posts
When you have the opportunity to get a link from a stellar site, take the time to create thoughtful, relevant content that will interest the audience. As a result, you are not only giving that site great content, which helps their visibility as well as your own, and perhaps another chance to blog in the future, but also increasing the chances of having your content seen by others. Think of it this way – if you write a great guest post, the chances of this post being shared on social sites continues to increase. As more social shares increase, awareness and authority increases. And although still very early in the game, search might begin to pick up on these social cues thus ranking the content, or your site, higher in results.
3. Quality Anchor Text
Whether it is a guest blog post on a third-party site or links on your own side, don’t include exact match keywords in all of your anchor text. This could be viewed by the search engines as keyword stuffing, and the pages/content could possibly be ignored. Vary up the anchor text, be creative, and still link accordingly.
Check out the video below and let me know your three take-aways for the new year:
