As an established SEO company, we have become familiar with the best white-hat practices to achieve top search engine rankings for business websites. We are strong advocates of strategic link building. Link building can carry a huge part of the load in achieving great ranking on top search engines. It is estimated by many that as much as 90% of a sites ranking success originates from strategic link building. A critical comment is that any and all link building should be ethical, white-hat work. The use of "link farms" should never be considered for your link building strategy.
Major search engines, like Google, have terms of service which must be respected or your site can be penalized or even banned from ranking at any level. Additionally, using only white-hat techniques, and providing quality links, delivers the most staying power for ranking. Listed below are some tips for effective, white-hat link building.
Blogging is a great tool for distibuting fresh content across the internet. Using a popular platform like Blogger or Wordpress makes blogging very easy, and the price is right (FREE!). You will get the best results by writing articles, or posts, that are at least 300-500 words, and that contain good use of key phrases and SEO empowered anchor text in your links.
Writing and posting informative, well articulated articles will draw a lot of attention and is a great way to get backlinks, as well as get links to your site from the web property where the content is posted. It is important for the user and the search engines to craft quality articles and avoid the quick and thoughtless approach to article writing. Some of the best articles on the web are how-to's, research papers, and helpful tips articles. Our personal recommendation is to avoid using article spinning software. "Spun articles" are obvious spam, are the lazy persons way of chasing success, and will have a short life span on Google. You should never plagiarize copy and republish it as your own.
The use of social bookmarking sites is a great strategy. There are hundreds of social media sites, each with its own personality. With time and effort you can find the sites that are relative to your business and setup accounts and profile pages on these sites. Finding high page rank sites will provide better backlinks, and give you the opportunity to get your content in front of a huge audience. Some of the top social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Sphinn. Always respect the terms of use for these sites, stay on topic, and post quality content no more than once a day.
Social media networking sites offer further opportunities. Many of these sites can be linked together so that content posted on one will be automatically posted on another. Top social media networking sites include Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Linkedin. Some of these, like Facebook and Linkedin, allow you to create a business or company page. This allows you to promote your business while keeping your personal page private. These sites are best used when you actively seek "connections" with other users of these sites. Not only will connections assure that people are reading your content, but it also introduces you to like minded people who can help you in your professional pursuits. We recommend placing links to your social media sites in your business email signature an dother places where you can promote traffic building.
All of the aforementioned tasks and activities should be supported by having the exact URL's to be "pinged" by a service like Ping-O-Matic, and whenever possible use RSS feeds to help distribute your content.
