SEO link building - which websites are the best
Links, links everywhere! But where, why? Hang on, who?
Link building is an important part in any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. In an attempt to make a website seem more popular with search engine spiders it is important to gain quality inbound links to your website.
Link popularity
OK, but what is popularity? Simply put, link popularity essentially describes how popular a website is based on the number of links from other sites pointing to it. For example a site with 100 inbound links is seen to be more important than a site with 10 inbound links.
Link quality
OK so now we have quantity, what about quality? The quality of the link is much more important than the quantity of links. A few good quality links can increase your websites search engine positioning much more than a huge amount of poor quality links. A quality website will have to following attributes:
- A high Google page rank
- Search engine friendly coding with all its pages indexable
- Relevant content to your particular site
- Small number of outgoing links on the page you will be linked on
- The links on the page should be well classified and focused
Avoid artificial link farms and web rings as search engine spiders will place no importance on these types of inbound link. As a general rule, if a link is not created to be read or followed by humans, the link will be considered spam.
Where to get quality links
A great place to start gain quality and relevant inbound links are website directories. Website directories provide a topical and categorised list of links. The Strongest Links website goes one step further by creating a list of website directories ranking them on the quality of link they will provide you.
Next comes the social websites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, MySpace and reddit which provide an easy way to create some user generated content (i.e. content generated by you, the user) with links to your website or a particular page /post on your website. These social websites generally have a lot of traffic and a high page rank which can filter through to your website with each link that you create, not to mention all the extra eyes you will have on your website.
It is a black art trying to gain quality inbound links to a website, one that I will forever be wrangling with. If you have any insights, suggestions or funny stories please let me know.
Technorati Tags: SEO, Interesting sites, link building, website directories, social websites
August 7th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Excellent work Mr Oppenheim, I have no idea how you have time to write all these articles but I’m very impressed.
I see you mentioned social websites to increase links and traffic but what about forum sites? I guess you could include a web address/email in your signature and you’d have a link back to your site every time you post.
I had a look at the car city site, very nice. One thing I wanted to ask - I noticed you have put the key words in purple at the top to blend in with the background. I was under the impression that if google caught you doing this it would mean sandbox time. Or is it safe to do when the background colour is slightly different?
BTW I love this preview function on messages. I’ll have to steal the script from you.
Melbourne Specials and Discounts
-above is a shameless link building exercise. Do you feel used?
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I believe that if your completely hide the text, eg (style=”display: none”), then your sending your website to the blacklist. However as with blending the text in with the background, it is still visible, so therefore, I believe it is allowed. There will always be a large difference between being visible and not.
-above you can find, no shameless link building exercises.
August 26th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
@Shane, yeah forum sites would work well, however, the rules still apply: the inbound link still needs to be relevant otherwise Google will just ignore it. Google does read your CSS file, however, it is still unclear what they are doing with this information. As Az mentioned as long as a user can read the text I think it can be consider NOT spam, but if you are deliberately hiding the text off left or with display none, that is a different story. But the question is: what about image replacement techniques that use CSS to the hide text?
Also, with all links in the comments on my site there is a ‘nofollow’ attribute. This is to tell search engines not to follow the link, see Wikipedia for more information. If you want to post comments on blogs that don’t have ‘nofollow’ attributes, try reading this: over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs
March 18th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
nice one dude, i am becoming a fan of yours
March 29th, 2010 at 7:05 am
Hi just came across your blog and i thank you for your story it was informative. I am interested about doing link building for my site too. Have you used the scrapebox.com program? If so is it good? If not then what is the best tool? Thank you.
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