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Link Building 2012 - the best methods

As I have mentioned in many times before the two important factors to SEO success are links and content, but what is the best way to link build in 2012?

"Ethical, manual, natural, honest, quality and relevant links"

When building links these are the things that need to be at the front of your mind, there is no point building links that are automated, irrelevant and from a website that is not even included in the search engines.

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Best practice

The general rules are have your keyword in the anchor text (the text that gets highlighted and underlined blue), have it on websites that are included in the search engines (simply search in the search engine for the URL of the website) and have the link surrounded by relevant content where possible. As a general rule of thumb the closer the relevance of the website and the more page rank the site has the more benefits you will get from the link. It is also important to have a good link mix (by this I mean a variety of links from different types of websites) to make your links natural and affective.

The main methods to gain links are as follows;

Link Bait

The most natural way of gaining links, people linking because they want to. This can be done with great content, software, free things (information, products, services, discounts) or something WOW. This then prompts people to tell other people about your website and they do this by linking to you.

Thematic Links

These links are gained by going online, finding relevant websites (normally by using search results from relevant keywords) and requesting a link. These are not very affective if the link goes two ways but if they are one way they are of great value and worth the time you spend finding them. An example would be Amazon linking to a small bookshop would be a great link for the small book shop.

Social Media

You can gain lots of links from social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. These sites allow people to talk about what ever they want and people link to sites they like. You can also upload videos and other media types. One benefit from this is some of the social media sites have millions of users so you can gain as much traffic from them as you could a search engine. These sites also let you rate content (for example Twitter tweets) and this can also help with your SEO efforts.

Article Sites

There are lots of websites and bloggs that allow you to add your content onto them, in return you get a link back to your website. Remember when doing this only submit an article to one site and make sure it is unique. This enables you to get valuable one way links back to your website and there are lots of good websites that offer this.

Web Directories

These are things link the yellow pages (or free versions). The more traffic the sites get the better the link will be as you will also get direct traffic from the website. These are of lower value than the above but helps build up a good link mix and can help build relevancy to your website.

Forums and Bloggs

I put these two together because I find the methods similar, you are either adding a thread or commenting on one either way you are adding some new or additional content to a discussion on a site and getting a link back to your website.

The Random methods

There are lots and lots of other methods to gain links (for example wish list websites) and you can use these to gain links and some can be of value. The key is ethical, manual, natural, honest, quality and relevant links.

Things to look out for

Some websites use a NOFOLLOW command in there pages which basically means the links are not worth anything and won't gain you any value. You can check this by going to the website in your browser, clicking view, click source, press Ctrl+f on your keyword and finding "nofollow". This will give you a really quick way to find if the links will be worth while or not. This does not work every time but it will help you. There are lots of tutorials online to show you how to check this.

Don't gain too many links in a short space of time as this is seen as a spam method.

Don't use link triangles; they will catch you out eventually.

Don't use linking circles; they will catch you out eventually.

Don't use software to generate your links; they will catch you out eventually.

Stick to the search engine guidelines and keep it ethical.