1. Continually expand your link portfolio and the number of domains linking back to your site.

Set a goal for the number of links you need to acquire per week, to start off with you may say 10 links per week, that should do for a reasonable size site.

Get links from different domains – remember Google can tell if your link portfolio all come from the same place.

2. Get links from high quality and high authority sources – the more links you get from good authority sites the more natural links you’ll get.

Make sure you that focus on getting followed links – although nofollowed links do count for something they have nowhere near as much weight as followed links.

3. Target your landing pages keywords

Make sure that you target the keywords featured on your landing pages by using them in the anchor text – whilst remembering to use a bit of variety.

Don’t use the same anchor text for all your links because Google will recognize your tactic and mark you down for it – that being said you want to target the primary keyword wherever possible.

4. Deep Link

Deep links are a natural part of a link portfolio, if the majority of links come into to your homepage it could signal to Google that you are trying to play the system. What’s you can’t target that many keywords in one page so as a long term strategy it’s a good idea to spread the page rank throughout the site.

Remember when deep linking you should be targeting the pages that already rank for long tail terms and deliver traffic.

5. Get lots of different types of links

Make sure you get lots of different types of links, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of finding a type of link building and then sticking with it (such as article marketing), if you don’t mix up the types of links you get you’ll soon find Google will work out what you’re doing and stop you doing it.

6. Make sure that pages that link back to you are relevant to your sites topics.

The relevancy of a page is largely determined by the following factors:

Title tag, URL, anchor text, heading and bold tags, alt tags, body text

7. Get links that are local to you – especially if you are have a local focus

It makes sense but if you are going to target local search phrases then it makes sense to build up your portfolio based on local search terms. Incidentally, these will all help in the long run when you start to compete on the national terms.

8. Think about the links that already exist on a page and domain

Do you really want to be associated with a page that links out to loads of other sites? On the whole that’s not a natural way for links to be placed on page.

Also think about where the links will be placed – the best place for a SEO link is arguably the first link on the page otherwise it’s beneficial to place it in a well structured piece of content that is relevant to the link and landing page.

9. Don’t go near bad neighbourhoods

It may sound obvious but you really must be careful that you don’t link to or don’t attract links from bad neighbourhoods, that is anything that is remotely spammy, although officially Google doesn’t penalize you for being linked to you can get tarred with the same brush as members of your link portfolio – so be careful!

10. Don’t link exchange (it’s ok from time to time though)

A few years back in SEO everyone linked to everyone else, if someone linked to your site you linked back and said thank you. This kind of reciprocal linking made ranking really easy, but then Google got smart to it and no longer ranked reciprocated links as higher – in fact if you had loads of reciprocated links Google began to ignore them.

Then we saw the rise of 3-way linking, this saw a central resource get links from one website and link out to another one – the thing is natural linking doesn’t work like that.

Remember, if you do something wrong in SEO (and if you don’t you’re not trying hard enough!) you’ll probably get penalized by Google, it’s not the end of the world, fix what you’ve done wrong, submit a reconsideration request and try again.

Need some help with link building? Get in touch or contact us through our contact form for more information.