Despite recent advancements in the realm of semantic search, major search engines like Google and Bing still rely heavily on traditional links to gauge relevance.
Alongside content creation, link building is one of the main pillars of effective SEO. The best practices that govern the creation of links tend to change every year, often quite dramatically.
Here are a few tips you can count on to yield SEO dividends as we move towards 2014.
Update Older Content for Today
Creating content is time-consuming and expensive compared to updating existing work. In many cases, you can take aging content and update it with a smattering of new material to achieve high rankings in Google’s organic results for specific queries.
Doing so helps to maintain the value of your content and generate loads of fresh traffic all at the same time without a lot of effort.
Reinforce Your Brand with Authorship
Google’s Authorship markup has quickly become one of the most inexpensive and effective ways to improve an individual or brand’s standing online. By including simple HTML snippets in your work, you can strengthen your brand’s reputation overnight.
Once you’ve established a name for yourself, inertia takes over and your existing links lead to new ones. A unified body of work that’s respected by consumers can cement your status as an authority worthy of recognition.
Ditch Keyword-Optimized Anchor Text
For far too long, SEO practitioners have placed an undue amount of faith in the ability of keyword-optimized anchor text to improve organic results. These days, exact match anchor text smack of unnatural link building.
Basically, it makes you look like you’re trying too hard to build links that benefit you without focusing on improving user experience. Just make sure that your anchor text is accurate and descriptive without worrying too much about specific keywords.
Aim for Inbound Link Diversity
You don’t need to focus solely on getting links from high-profile web properties to make your overall link profile productive. Links from low-ranking sites can assist you in improving organic rankings as well.
Getting inbound links from a variety of sites at every level of the PageRank scale demonstrates that a wide swath of the general public or at least your niche finds your content helpful. Google will reward you accordingly for your content’s broad appeal.
Use Google+ to Proliferate Content
In the social media arena, nothing beats Google+ when it comes to generating organic links from all over the web. By using relevant content targeted at your top follower demographics, you’re guaranteed to pull in more links with little effort.
Obviously, you’ll need to spend a decent amount of time networking and building up a decent fan base. However, the results are well worth it.
A Link Network That Delivers
As you’re probably aware, one of the main goals of building links is to establish clout by highlighting your content. Your site’s authority in your niche in the eyes of the major search engines depends greatly on how many people are willing to link to your content without prompting.
Obviously, the best way to achieve this is by putting out content that simply can’t be ignored. Do that and the links you desire will follow.
