Here’s a mind map with a chock-full of link building tips in the brave new world after Penguin and Panda were released by Google. Click on the image to zoom in…
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And, here’s the full summary of the points in the mind-map…
1. Find Sites in Same Niche
- Find other sites in same niche and try to drop links on them
- Even if links are paid links. Just make sure Site does not openly advertise that they take paid links / sponsored articles
- Drop posts on Online Forums and Blog Comments in same niche
2. Fix your Anchor Text in your Backlinks
- Rotate Keywords in the Anchors of Backlinks to make things look as Natural as possible. The idea here is to make things look as random and natrual as possible – and you can get an idea of what is needed in your niche by examining the backlink anchor profiles of the top 3 sites in your niche.
- Use main keyword as anchor link at around 10% frequency only. Not more.
- Use Secondary Keywords, LSI and Long Tail Keywords around 10% to 20% as anchors
- Use your site raw URL in different looking formats (with www , without, with slash and without etc) around 20% of time
- Use Brand Anchors around 10% to 20% of the time… your own Brand name or site brand name as anchor.
20% of time use generic words like click here, visit our page, etc - Broad keywords in your niche can be used around 10% ratio.
- Use a few image links if possible, and also include some random full sentence links.
3. Do Not Over Optimize Your Site
- Keyword Density under careful check… around 1% only
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing
- Write for humans not machines
- Use LSI Keywords
- Use your target keyword in the TITLE tag OR the URL page name. Either one only with the Keyword – not both. This is an unconfirmed technique of avoiding over-optimization. Use with caution.
- Do not use hidden text, or page cloaking techniques targeted to fool the search engine bots
4. Increase Your Domain Authority
- Make sure your domain is “aged”
- Have fantastic content on your site
- Make sure content is meaty and unique
- Keep adding fresh content to your site
- Build community and encourage interaction
- Do not crowd your site with ads
- Boost Your Social Signals
- Link out to other trusted sites in your niche or pages on other trusted sites like Wikipedia and Youtube
5. Ensure Your Site has SUPERIOR Content
- Start Blog, if do not have oneAdd new fresh content regularly
- Add new fresh content regularly
- Write unique articles on your site and service, and more importantly on your industry and niche
- Embed your content with rich media content like images, videos and slideshows
- No auto Spin content gibberish – specially for on-site content
- Each article to be at least 1500 words to 5000 words. The longer the better. Avoid 300 word posts.
- Do not hire low quality writers for this. Invest more.
- Encourage commenting by your community
- Become and position yourself as an expert in your niche. Use your personal Google Authorship / rel tag while posting.
- Start a Forum within a sub-domain or sub-folder of your site
6. Google Authorship Markup tag
- This is now starting to play an important role and establishes an extra layer of trust with Google
- When you post you need to add your Google+ profile link containing your unique Author ID to it
- It will help establish you as having more authority and this will pass down to your sites
- You need to login to your Google+ account and add your site in the “”contributor”” section
7. Ensure Your on-site factors are optimized
- Check for crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools
- Make sure all pages intact and 301 redirect done for old pages that do not exists any longer
- Check your site speed / page loading time
- Check your bounce rate
- Check the average user time spent on your site
- Make sure robots.txt and sitempa.xml are all ok and no duplicate pages exist
- If there are missing links more than around 20% you might get hit for quality and notice a drop in SERPs as a result. Best to keep this error rate below 2% to 3%. Best to keep it 0%.
8. Fixing Old Links
- Deleting Links is tedious Approach but has worked for some
- After deleting you need to Dsiavow the unhealthy links you could not remove and then send a reconsideration request to Google – if you got a manual notice / penalty.
- You can and start creating a more high quality links, in an effort to dilute and “”drown out”” the low quality links signal ratio.
9. Your Own Micro-Site Niche Network
- Build your own “”Private”” and “”secret”” niche network of sites that you control
- You can buy Expiring High PageRank domains by using tools like PR Powershot or Register Compass.
- Use WordPress to build them
- Use plugin WPmanage to manage them all from one interface
- Do not leave any footprint for Google to detect and realize they all belong to you
- Hide your Whois domain ownership info or register with different names (real names of friends and family etc)
- Do not use common DNS server and use multiple DNS and IPs spread over multiple geographical territories.
- Use different hosting companies is easy way, to achieve IP diversity (don’t use seohosting.com as Google is on them I think).
- Make sure all your sites have About Us, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Contact Us pages. Of course this needs also to be unique and different
- Needless to say that each site should have great content in your main niche or sub-niche or somewhat similar niche content
- This is a long term investment as this strategy will play a very important role.
- If you find another person in your niche and is not a competitor, with multiple sites also, trade links with him – but do not do 2 way or 3 way link exchanges.
- Slowly add backlinks to your main money site into these micro-sites as they grow over time. No sudden moves. Don’t over-link, just a couple of links on pages with great content.
10. Social Media Signals
- Social Signals are now playing a very important role
- Make sure you at the least have a Facebook Fan Page, FB Likes Button, Twitter Account, G +1 setup
- All pages on your site need to have the voting buttons for each of the above
- If you want to buy some traffic… buy it wisely
- Don’t order 300 FB likes overnight.
- Google has an advanced Algorithm to check for fake G+1’s. So never try and game the G+1 sharing signals.
- Order multiple geographically located user votes that are drip fed slowly into your site.
- So, if you want 100 likes – spread them out over 2 to 3 months.
11. Study Your Top Competitors
- Reverse engineering is one big strategy that works no matter what Google does to its algorithm.
- Study the top 3 and top 10 competitors in your niche
- See what kind of links they have built to hold their ranks
- Emulate and build similar type of links
12. Promote Homepage and Inner Pages
- It is very important to promote multiple pages across your site and corresponding multiple keywords – simultaneously
- Do not focus only on one page and one keyword at a time
- It looks highly suspicious and is not organic
- Even if you go slow, promote multiple pages across your site and also multiple keyword groups
13. Guest Post Blogging
- Find other Blogs in your nicheWrite high quality articles, and target each to be placed on one site only (unique posts).
- Write high quality articles, and target each to be placed on one site only (unique posts).
- Approach site operator via email and ask them if they are interested in unique post for their site only
- Most bloggers will agree as they get free high quality content
- Make sure to add your backlink within the article post or at the end in a author resource box
- Some site operators may ask for a small fee
- You may also use this technique to get backlinks on Private Niche Blog Networks. Just make sure the networks are really private and go for smaller networks and do a mix of different networks. Never depend on one single network only.
14. Insulation Technique
- In your on-page and off-page content building, make sure you link out to other High Authority sites.
- This will add value and trust to your post
- Don’t leave footprint by linking out to always the same inner pages on authority sites, across multiple posts
- Mix it up! Also, link to industry and niche authority industry portals (that are not your direct competitors)
15. Post High Quality Content on OTHER Authority Sites
- Post on sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, Wetpaint etc.
- Post lengthy and high quality content
- Ensure content has rich media embeds
- Link out to a few other high authority sites like wikipedia and youtube. Link to related inner pages on them.
16. Build Links Slowly
- Link Velocity is important. Start slow and be constant. Do not stop mid-way and resume later.
- Many people make the mistake of building links too fast
- Slow and steady Drip Feed links work amazingly well
- Build backlinks for variety keywords and variety inner-pages of your site
- Going slower at most times helps more
- Don’t worry if you see your rankings bounce initially up and down. Its called the Google Dance and their algorithm is checking things out. Its not unusual to see your site go to position 500 and then bounce right back to page 1.