Effective Link Building Tips
SEO is primarily about link building. The more quality links a website has, the better results it will fetch on Google and other search engines. So, the best way to optimize your website and make it search engine-friendly is by sketching out an effective link building plan and then try to execute it successfully.
Some of the fundamentals of link building are:
- Internal link building – Sitemap comes first in the ‘to-do list’ of internal link building. Google guidelines have always emphasized on the role of the sitemap and its importance for building an SEO-friendly site. A site map helps in quick and effective indexing of the internal pages of a website. More recently, XML sitemaps have become more popular and it’s advised that every website should have it.
- Linking externally – Whenever you are looking for external links, make sure that the site in which you are seeking links is top-notch. You should analyze factors like the page and domain page rank of the site, its domain and page authority, outbound links of the page, age of the site, etc. before thinking of attaining any links from it. Do not link with sites with a lot of outbound links as they are most likely to be marked as a spam site by Google.
- Do not buy attractive-looking cheap link plans, which promise 1000s of links for a few bucks, as those are likely to link your site with junk sites. People promoting these kinds of plans use software to spam links and if you indulge yourself in this activity, sooner or later, Google will penalize your site.
Apart from the above points, it’s always recommended that link building should take place naturally. The best way to get natural links is to forget about link building and concentrate on building a quality website. Once your website becomes popular for its quality and makes a reputation for itself on the internet, people will automatically recommend it to their friends and you will get natural traffic and backlinks.
White Hat Vs. Black Hat SEO
SEO is mostly about getting quality backlinks from different websites. The basic fundamental of SEO is that the more quality backlinks your site has, the better it will be placed in Google results. All webmasters know the importance of backlinks and therefore, they are constantly trying to get quality backlinks from all possible places over the internet.
There are three main categories in which SEO can be categorized. They are white hat or White Label SEO, gray hat and black hat SEO. White hat SEO refers to the link building tactics that follow Google webmaster’s guidelines. Google wants to keep everything neat and clear to the best of its ability and has, therefore, defined certain rules, which it expects all webmasters to follow. If one abides by these rules, his/her websites do better than the others, who try to trick Google for attaining backlinks.
White hat SEO involves obtaining neat backlinks. The ideal form of white hat SEO would be natural link building for a site. This is automatically obtained in the long run, when a site builds its goodwill on the internet and people give its reference on their sites, forums, blogs, etc. Apart from that, all backlinks obtained while considering and respecting Google’s webmaster’s guidelines would fall under this category.
On the other hand, black hat SEO involves attaining quick ranking, which is mostly obtained by flooding links of a website on the internet using a software, which sometimes results in instant ranking. But these rankings do not hold for long as Google keeps on analyzing all the websites and if it finds out that any site is dealing in black hat methods, then it completely bans and ignores that site in its search results.
Therefore, it’s obviously recommended that one should follow white hat SEO rather than black or grey hat methods because it is what Google wants. If webmasters provide Google what it is looking for, then Google too will revert with rewards. So, all the webmasters are advised to follow white hat SEO methods.
