Link Building Recipe – Picking the Quality Ingredients

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Links, links, links. Does everyone focus on getting backlinks?

For me personally yes. But I’m not a real big fan of aggressively creating thousands of links. For me it’s more of picking the quality links. I likened it to choosing quality ingredients not getting just any ingredient to cook a perfect recipe of links.

I’m in the midst of building a niche site so this is something I’m looking into at the moment as well.

Before you read my handpicked ingredients, please check out this mini guide on the type of links.

Quality Ingredient #1

Gradual Link Building

I would HIGHLY discourage creating 1001 links especially by submitting tons of articles or submitting to 1001 directories in just one day. Bad Bad Bad! Search engines don’t like this and your website will definitely be flagged for doing this. Banning is the worst case scenario. (and most likely too)

Ways to Build Links gradually:

• Blog commenting – If you have time to comment on 20 blogs a day, over a course of a month you will have 600 backlinks.
• Guest Posting – One of the best ways to get quality backlinks and if done at a frequency of 1 a week gives you 4 quality backlinks a month. Not much but quality first! You would also need to learn how to choose which blogs to guess post. No doubt getting a high PR or high traffic blog should be your FIRST choice.
• Write Quality Articles – Need I say more? The main driving force behind the internet is CONTENT. What sort of articles you might ask? Pillar articles* and link bait posts are the best kind of content.

(*Pillar articles are long posts that are designed to teach your readers something. A well researched, well written article is an example).

Quality Ingredient #2

DoFollow and NoFollow Links

I must admit that my link building efforts in this area is disproportionately skewed towards DoFollow links. The massive DoFollow propaganda across the blogosphere is also the reason why I was sucked into commenting on DoFollow blogs initially. The other reason is that there are many more active followers and commentors on DoFollow enabled blogs.

But I do put my efforts these days into NoFollow links. The reason why you should do both is

• It is definitely more natural to have both. Search engines can sniff out your link building behavior if it’s more DoFollow-ish and will penalize you.
• NoFollow Links still bring traffic. These people could be regular commentors or visitors. They could even be your customers so why disregard them?
• Trustworthy NoFollow Links. Sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Wikipedia are great NoFollow sites to have links back. Don you think search engines definitely will pay attention to them?

Quality Ingredient #3

Anchor Text

This is something I’m cautious about on all the sites I own. For me personally I do a mixture of anchor text on a particular keyphrase. Say blog commenting is my anchor text. It will be a mixture of

• blog commenting,
• blog commenting tips,
• how to blog comment,
• tips on blog commenting
• reasons to comment on blogs

linking to a particular URL. The SEO fanatics might disagree with me on this but I still believe in doing things naturally. For my blog post on blog commenting to appear on the first page of Google, I would have to compete with 11,200,000 results. I’ll pass that..

Another thing about anchor text is to choose what kind of keyword phrases to use wisely. Highlighting a keyword phrase like Click Here to your free ebook is bad! Try searching “click here” on Google and you will be competing with almost 1 billion websites with the keyphrase “Click Here”.

Quality Ingredient #4

Diversify Your Link Sources

This boils down to looking natural to search engines once again. Get a good mix of

• Old and New Domains
• Related Websites and Non-Related Websites. I’m not too sure about this but I would lean more towards related ones but NOT purely related websites.
• High & Lower PR websites. For example, commenting on a well respected blog with multiple diverse links, a High PR and also getting the link love back is an example.

My aim this year is to focus more on higher authority domains which I haven’t been focusing too much on in the past.

Quality Ingredient #5

Page Location

My principle with regards to this is to put the important keywords and keyphrases first and the less important further on in my post. Although there are quite important juicy content in the middle of my posts, I won’t fret too much about it. As with footers, there’s a whole host of literature around discouraging putting too much in the footer. My personal view is not to have too much content in the footer but stuff like tools, popular posts, about me section, sitemap are some of the things I’ll leave there.

Search engines as some of you might expect will focus on a few things like:

• Links in the header section i.e navigation
• Links in the beginning of posts section
• Less value towards sidebars crowded with a zillion ads or even a few ads.
• Footers

Quality Ingredient #6

Deep Linking

Don’t forget to add links back to sub-pages or individual posts. That is why it is important to have links that link between posts and get links back to your individual posts from an external source. There are basically 2 main things to follow about this.

• Adopt good internal linking between your posts or pages. This makes it easier for search engines to index your content.
• Get people to endorse links to your individual posts. Use Quality Ingredient #1 to achieve this.

Right now the challenge is to achieve more endorsement for my individual posts rather than internal linking.

Your Thoughts??

So what do you think of this recipe? Is it complete or is there any that you like to add or change. Let me know as I will compile a recipe for all to take away on a PDF soon!