Link Building In A Post-2010 World

How you build your links today is very different than how you might have built them two years ago. The online landscape has changed a lot! Some of the new changes to SEO really are game changers!

We’ve been talking a lot about the current trends in SEO. However, with link building playing such an important role in SEO, it warrants a closer look of its own.

Two years ago, you might have focused on blog commenting, forum profile links, Squidoo lenses, etc. Today, those strategies are less and less effective.

Instead, a whole slew of new link building techniques are in order. These new techniques will help you build backlinks that Google actually values, and will help you improve your rankings.

Link Building is the process of collecting backlinks for your site. You can learn more about link building here.

==> Social Bookmarking

Getting a piece of content ranked well on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon or Digg is a sure-fire way to get a flood of traffic and links to your site.

The links to your site will often be many relatively low quality links rather than a few high quality ones. That said, because all the links you’ll receive are genuine links, Google still looks upon them reasonably favorably.

If you have a creative mind, developing free web apps can be a great way to generate traffic. Simple web apps can be created for as little as $100 through eLance. More complex ones naturally cost more.

If you’re in the gaming mouse industry, for example, a simple web app that lets people test how quickly their mouse responds by moving it on-screen could be incredibly popular.

Create useful apps and give them away for free. Your “payment” comes in the form of grateful links rather than money.

One form of linking that’s more or less dead is link requests and reciprocal linking.

Back in the day, it was possible to get a link simply by asking for it. Links weren’t the valued commodity that they are today. Webmasters would link to you if you simply emailed enough of them. Today, that just doesn’t work.

Reciprocal linking is also dead. The “I will link to you so you link to me” philosophy no longer generates rankings. Most linking schemes like three-way linking and link wheels have also been detected and neutralized by Google already.

==> Guest Blogging

One form of link building that’s been getting more and more popular is guest blogging. Guest blogging is writing high quality content on other people’s sites in exchange for a link back to your website.

This is one of the most popular ways of generating backlinks today. If you have a decent reputation, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get other sites to agree to publish content you give them for free.

The resulting backlink(s) are both highly relevant editorial class backlinks and high in quality. In short, Google will love them.

==> Blog Commenting

This is a point of huge contention among SEO types. However, one thing is clear… blog comment links, even when dofollow and with correct anchor text (thank you CommentLuv Premium), are worth less than they were two years ago.

Some SEOs argue that they are completely worthless but I’ve not yet found that to be true in my own testing.

Google has realized that a lot of the links coming off of blogs are wrongly approved spam… and that majority of others are unrelated to the topic of either the post or comment.

I personally believe that blog commenting is still a viable strategy but as much from a personal branding and organic exposure perspective as an SEO perspective. Because these links are being devalued, more are needed today than were needed prior, to achieve the same net effect.

==> The Race for the 1′s and Likes

In the past, getting Liked and “+1ed” was more of a novelty than a business necessity. You put a Facebook widget on your site because you want to build a little credibility or help launch a page. But by and large, it wasn’t a central strategy.

Search engines are looking more and more closely at social signals to determine rankings. Search started integrating these signals only in the last year or two, and they’re likely to get stronger and stronger in the near future. In many ways they are functionally the same as social bookmarking links when it comes to contributing Google love

Social is going to play a much more pervasive role in SEO this year on all fronts.

Ileane from Basic Blog Tips gives three easy ways to identify the backlinks flowing to your site.

These are some of the main trends in link building today. Make sure you watch for trends yourself, both in your own industry and in marketing at large. Spot the trends, jump in front of the wave and get in on the action before the tactic gets overdone.