Web site owners know that incoming links to a website can affect its performance in search engine results. Therefore, many webmasters use basic link-building tactics such as submitting their sites to link exchanges and online directories. Such techniques can produce numerous incoming links, but they often prove detrimental to the SEO effort because search engines can evaluate the quality of incoming links.
Google prefers to see organic links that come from organic sources in an effort to build the value of online content. Therefore, when the search engine finds a lot of low-value sites linking to a website, it assumes that the destination site also has little value. This assumption sends websites lower in search engine results rather than higher and causes many website owners to experience frustration.
Advanced link-building techniques avoid the pitfalls of basic techniques by actively seeking backlinks from high-value websites that can contribute to favorable search engine rankings.
Advanced Link Building. Guest Posting and Link Bait
Two important strategies, guest posting and link baiting, comprise the backbone of advanced link-building programs. These link-building methods often take a lot of time and effort, but they achieve quality results. The lack of instant and easy results causes many website owners and SEO novices to give up on advanced link-building techniques, but those who persevere reap impressive rewards.
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Guest Posting
Guest posting opens the door for business owners to share their expertise with the online community and the chance to add a link to an authoritative website. As with links, not all guest posts have equal value. Guest posts that achieve a high degree of amplification can produce a substantial amount of SEO benefits because Google assigns them high link authority based on the site on which the guest post resides and the response of readers.
Guest posts that appear on obscure blogs with few readers and few social signals will not achieve much for the author’s website even when the author includes a well-placed optimized link back. This happens because Google assumes that the hosting site has little value and authority in its industry. Therefore, people who want to promote their websites will write guest posts on popular and authoritative websites that generate a lot of discussion in on-site comments and on social networks. The properties of the host site and its readers amplify the SEO benefits of the guest post and deliver significant page rank improvements to the author’s website.
Authors and site owners should use one or more popular SEO tool to evaluate the page rank of a host site before bothering to submit a guest post to it. Also, prospective guest bloggers should estimate their potential benefit of evaluating the page rank, incoming links and social popularity of guest posts already on the site. When website owners have guest posts with many incoming links on high-ranking websites, the links from those guest posts will have a substantial SEO value of the owners’ sites.
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Link Bait
Link bait consists of unusual, surprising, valuable or funny content that instinctively appeals to Internet users. When website owners post this type of material, it becomes very popular, and many other websites link to it. Viral videos, info graphics, news stories and blog posts spread across the Internet like wildfire and help webmasters achieve a large number of authoritative links in a short time. When Google sees these links, it recognizes them as organic and adds weight to the host site.
Although link bait strategies seem easy at first, they can backfire on novices who do not realize how easily other webmasters can steal or imitate viral content and use it for their own advanced link-building campaigns. Therefore, experienced SEO professionals will create link bait that is difficult to hijack.
The Final Thought
Rather than wasting time on fast and shallow link-building campaigns, website owners and SEO professionals should focus their efforts on advanced strategies like guest posting and link baiting. Although advanced methods involve a lot more work, the organic and authoritative backlinks these methods produce delivered impressive SEO benefits that will propel websites straight to the top of search engine results pages.
