Patience with Link Building - Go Organic

Patience pays off with link building.  With the advent of Google Panda and the subsequent decline of rankings of a number of web sites that lack good content and have relied on an SEO strategy of building many links on totally unrelated sites.

It seems that many people still don't get the message that automated link building is an outdated strategy of SEO.  If programs like Akismet and others can detect spam content better than 99% of the time, then why can't Google do the same thing.   To these people I say WAKE UP!
 
Be patient and know that if you do good work, you will be rewarded.  Here are some tips on organic link building and a video session with Matt Cutts is included at the end.

 

Organic Link Building

This is a white-hat SEO strategy that helps people with sites that have good content become recognized as an authority by Google.

1. Link to sites that have keywords for which you want to rank for, in other words a relevant site.

2. Have a blog or blogs that generate content related to the keywords you are working with.  Hyperlink sparingly back to your site.  One hyperlink per blog entry and no more.  Otherwise it will look like too much self-promotion.

3. List your blogs in directories within your subject area.  The higher the rankings of the directories, the better for you.

4. When possible, do guest blogging with people who have related content.  Of course, you will have hyperlinks to related sites to help create an authority network.

5.  When making links on other sites, make sure that they have a higher ranking to leverage the amount of manual link-building you do.  Comments with significant contributing content to the web page helps as well.

6. Submit articles to article submission sites like Ezine. 

7.  See the video below where Matt Cutts is answering a question about how to build links that meet Google's ranking criteria.  I have covered a couple of his points, but he also talks about occasionally using contoversy, participation in related social groups, giving away free stuff and making tutorials and videos.

Blog Sites for Making Links

There are many places that you can use for link-building, but the overall best is to write good content. Scattering good content in many different locations on the web will help you get noticed. But don't make duplicate content, that kind of noticing will hurt your rankings and income potential. Here are some good sites where you can write articles for links:

Recommended Free Blog Sites

Weebly.com - This site is really easy to start up. There is no verification of addresses and you can enter any email to create an account. I like it for the mere simplicity of setting up a blog. The modular approach to building a page is really nice and easy to undo if you screw up placement. I highly recommend this site.

Blogger.com - I would be remiss if I didn't mention this. It is somewhat labrythian to set it up, but I have found that my sites that have 10 blog entries seem to get page rank quicker than sites than equivalent Wordpress sites. It is a mystery to me...

Wordpress.com - I have a domain that I own that has a blog with several pages and I am comfortable with this blog format. There is a lot of flexibility in how you make the blog look and there are plug-ins to help with various technical details like tracking traffic, automatic tweeting, meta tags, etc. I also have a free wordpress.com site that I use, however, the options are fewer on how you can do things. I find that this site is not ranking very well, too.

Amplify.com - This site is good for writing short blogs that have more content than a Tweet. It allows more characters and if you have something short to say, it is a good vehicle for that format. You can also create a blog post list for you main blog. Another format that is something like this is SheToldMe.com, but the advantage of this format is that you can get revenue from Google Adsense as well.

Posterous.com - I have used Posterous from the beginning because of the ability to send email posts to it. Recently, however, Blogger has added this feature. I still recommend posterous, however for quick posts and have another site for comments in niche areas of your main blog.

If anyone has other recommendations, I would like to hear what you have to say in a comment.