When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) many people classify practices of SEOers into two categories. White hat SEO techniques are those recommended by search engine standards. Black hat SEO techniques are not recommended and usually considered ’spammy’. Many times black hat techniques quickly raise rankings, making them very tempting, but could lead to being banished from the search listings.
Relevant inbound/outbound links help your site improve its relevance, increasing its organic rankings. Linking is one of the issues discussed within black and white hat techniques. Black hat linking techniques include link farms, spam blogs, page hijacking, and spamming in blog comments. These are not ethical approaches. All ‘fake’ content pages/messages to try to manipulate search engine algorithms.
So with all of the ‘easiest’ options being the ones that will harm your site, how can you ‘legally’, but still easily, increase links to your site? Try the following:
- Social Networks
- Creating Your Own Blog
- Blog Trackbacks
- Legitimate Blog Comments
- Press Releases
Posting articles or comments with links to any of the above provides a great source for incoming links. These are all ways to connect with your customers, while also creating links to help your organic search engine listings.
Social networks are still growing and quickly becoming a source for people to find information. Many of them are no longer just for finding personal friend information. MySpace, for example, has many different sections including movies, music, music videos, sports, weather, news, job listings and politics. With all of those in one place, who needs to go anywhere else? If you create a profile on social networks you can put links to your site or parts of your site for people to follow, while also helping your organic rankings.
Blogs are another very important part of linking. Every site today should have a blog. Search engines factor into relevance new content placed on a Web site. If you have a blog, you will hopefully be updating it on a regular basis, creating fresh content, and creating more links! On a blog you can include links to your own site as well as external links to partners, clients or other favorite blogs. If you include information in your blog that you read in another blog you can include trackbacks. If you get proactive you can go to other blogs and leave legitimate comments, as long as they are relevant and link back to your site.
Finally, press releases are a huge help in the online linking battle. In order for people to hear about you and find out what is going on with your company it is important to submit press releases to newswires. Some are free and some cost money, but both will help in your linking efforts!
There are many white hat ways to create links to your site, even though they may take a little more work than the black hat techniques. Just keep in mind the black hat techniques when linking so you don’t hurt yourself in the long run! Here are a few more pointers when it comes to link building:
Happy linking!
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Tags: Blogging • Linking • myspace • search engine optimization • SEO • social networks
Copyright © 2008 by IdeaStar. All rights reserved.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Inbound links to your site can’t hurt you, no matter how crappy they are.
If this were the case, I could nuke all my competitors into oblivion