Link building strategies- white or black? What values the most – The quality of the link, the value of type of link building or the need to scale processes to generate high quality targets?
There have been plenty of white hat and grey hat link building SEO strategies. White hat side of SEO included widget command, 302 hijacking, control anchors, plain vanilla paid links, domain acquisition, blog rings, mass directory submissions, forum spamming, content spinning, microsite spam and redirecting and many more. To name a few, Grey hat strategies included – Google local hijacking, affiliate schemes, reward-led blog linking, Google base mislisting, spurious sponsorship or badge schemes and other such.
The search engines especially Google are found to be responsible for struggle of over-reliant agencies, death of articles and over optimisation. The latest in line of tweaks triggering cries of many SEOs is the Google’s recently changed tolerance to guest post blogging. Today is indifference amongst the older hands and the new comers the reason of which can be attributed to their knowledge of link building.
Link building not has to be black or white; rather it has to be very simple with quality being ultimately an underpinning value of particular type of link building. Now the question here is- how is it quantifiable?
In recent new client backlink strategy audit, the highest priority was given to a directory submission. This directory was of UK’s Government’s NHS, National Health Service. However, the site derives genuine and relevant traffic being a high quality resource. Nevertheless, directory submissions cannot be taken as industry leading tool to transform your link building strategy; instead you need to embrace quality and appropriateness in your links.
Link building toolkit is very broad and a dynamic and cutting edge solution to link building in 2014 is – scale your processes to create more content opportunities and generate high quality targets for link building.
Scaling link building process:
To effectively build links you should add diversity to your content. Diversity can be in the domains of your overall link profile, in the tools you are using and in the process. Directories and guest posts are kinds of tools that can also be misused. So you should scale up your processes to effectively build links.
Segmenting the process:
To beat the competitors you need to follow SWOT approach and apply this to create new links. The approach has segmented key phrase sets on the outsets. For an example, if you are having in your competitive niche a fashion brand store and you are also looking forward to perform globally, you will have to determine your segments available to you. You can segment your market based on male or female, age group such as young, teens or adults, class, preference for casuals or formals, and much more. You can now construct the key phrases relating to “fashion brands”, “online shopping” “apparels” etc. Now, based upon the locations of our target markets, we can easily identify the top performing domains of our search engines for each of these sets and can create some meaningful search terms.
You can then make a good use of value assessment methodology and any ranking tool that best works for you. The starting point of your backlink SWAT analysis can be derived from this assessment giving you top performing domain for each segment.
Top performance domains
You might think that despite of your efforts of segmentation; you are getting the same domains returning on top again and again for each set. But you should know that there are more relevant niches than the last within niches within niches. A lot of online efforts and years of brand building is invested behind this and so you too need the same investment.
Getting highest bang for your buck
To get back the diverse links from top performing domains, all you need is to have good CONTENT. Also we have with us diverse type of valuable domains such as radio, local newspapers, podcasts, wikis, listing sites, unique directories, hobbyists, local authority domains, affiliated businesses, listing sites, magazines, social groups, mailing lists, university clubs ……
Each one of them is linked with different type of content that builds valuable links and derives traffic, increases brand awareness and helps building better marketing strategies. Now since you are building sustainable links, you are protecting your strategies, you are making it sure that you are not going to be penalised or devalued. Thus, at the same time you are building brand equity as well. So, you surely are going to reap rewards the next time there is a clamp down on black hat link building strategies.