Link Building Guide – SEO Guide

While there’s a lot of buzz about growing your Social followings, it has stayed separate from SEO. While Blogging and sharing your content can lead to some links, its not guaranteed.  In fact there is no correlation between social success and link building success.  People won’t link to your stuff even if they like it. The lesson here is: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Do SEO, do Social, and meet people in real life!

The first thing you can do is to get listed in your local chamber of commerce or directory websites. For us in Seattle, there’s quite a few examples:

• http://thinklocalseattle.org/
• http://www.seattlemade.org/
• http://seattleiteguide.com
• http://www.caphillchamber.org/

Some of these local’s directories do cost money, but it will get you the right kind of exposure.  That’s because all sites have the right keywords associated with your location.

Besides location, you can send Google topic based signals.  For us, we’re a Seattle based web design company.  We started looking at places where design companies are listed.  We found this gem. If you’re a wood worker, you can get a link from a directory like this: http://www.woodindustry.com/ Here’s a secret.  Try typing this into Google: “submit link” + “wood working” You should see a great list of sites to submit your content or your site to.

So now you’ve been searching a little bit to find who the authorities are on your subject.  Sometimes a good way to get a link from those sites is to offer your expertise. If you’re an expert on wood working, you can offer your wisdom to a site like this: https://drunkenwoodworker.com/blog Reach out to the site via their contact page or via e-mail.  When doing this outreach, you should ask to see if they’re accepting guest posts first.  Building trust is number one! You can reference your other posts in the guest post or ask them to link to you in the author descriptions.  Either way, you can get a link by providing your expertise.

Sometimes you can just ask for a link if your content is cool enough.  Let’s say that you have a full Illustrator tutorials set.  You can ask a design blog to see if they would be interested in including a link in their resources section.

Keep in mind that link building itself is a balancing act.  You can’t just build links from paid directories only, and hope that you’ll rank.  Doing a variety of things to get your site out there will make sure that Google doesn’t penalize you.  This includes Social as well. If you get penalized, chances of your domain ranking on Google again is slim to none.  Don’t build sketchy links from sketchy places! (Update: with the September 2016 rollout of Penguin 4.0, you can now just get rid of all of the bad links and you should be back on relatively soon on Google!) If all of this seems too much, you can always contact us.  Find out more about our content marketing services.