Link Building in the New Year
Posted - January 18, 2013
It’s a new year and we live in a post-Penguin world. While most may typically consider penguins as the cute animal stars for computer-animated movies or your local zoo’s winter exhibit, Google’s Penguin algorithm is more like a polar bear; a somewhat mysterious and potentially dangerous creature, roaming the net for bad SEO to devour. It has plenty to eat, and has sent many businesses into a frenzy on how to combat against the new changes in this constantly changing SEO landscape. That’s why we’ve taken the time to fight against negative SEO and highlight some guaranteed positive link-building strategies for 2013.
The new age of link building is all about quality, not quantity. Spend time producing superb, one-of-a-kind content and have it linked by strong, respectable publishers. Bottom line. That’s the goal for any good new SEO, in the simplest terms.
The value of links from social media sites will always be fruitful, especially if they’re going to your internal pages. You want unique and captivating anchor text with links that not only land on your homepage, but other internal pages too, such as product pages. But a successful SEO strategy in 2013 requires extreme diversity in your link building across all platforms. Google reports that nearly 25% of all Google searches are entirely unique. This means that as of 2013, 25% of the world’s queries for Google’s search engines have never been search before. This gives you an awesome advantage; it proves there are still endless ways to diversify your link building because people are still creating endless new terms to search for, and subsequently create links built on those terms. You will want to spend plenty of time on your anchor text; Google rewards developers who get creative with their keywords and anchor text and helps connect you to the creative users on the web. The key is not to pigeonhole yourself, branch out the locations from which you link as widely as possible.
Which brings me to the next strategy: media exposure. Making a viral video isn’t easy; so don’t set your expectations too high unless you’re willing to put in some serious time, money, and effort. But creating some kind of media or enhanced user experience for your product or service will naturally turn into strong inbound links. Use of unique pictures and inforgraphics work wonderfully because they are quick and easy to create or find, and even easier to share. You can also make your landing pages, or product pages, work better at converting customers by adding video to them. A product page, for example, could be greatly enhanced with the addition of a customer review video, an FAQ, or a How-To-Use guide. For FAQ’s or user guides, the content is most likely already written, because you’ve probably already written it for your site. Now you just have to turn it into a video! Videos can be fun or informative, as long as the content you provide is something worth sharing – in order to get more hits on your page.
In conclusion: The future of good SEO in a post-Penguin and Panda world is not about how much content there is, but how good the content is. If the content is truly good, truly unique, truly worthy of sharing, the social signals will go up. They will be the proof. You will get more tweets. You will get more Facebook shares, more likes, so forth and so on. This will have a domino effect – because those social pages tend to do better organically, get more visitors, more people naturally linking to them, and then the links from there will be better when they come into your site, with those visitors staying on your site for longer periods of time because you’ve used media in an intriguing way to reel them in and keep them around.
