Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:29 pm
If you follow the SEO world at all you may have read that recently several large companies in the USA have recently been banned by Google for buying mainly low quality inbound links in efforts to increase their organic search engine rankings. Having been involved in SEO for over 11 years, I was surprised that this made the news as it’s not a new tactic and I have been aware of it for probably at least 7 or 8 years now.
This led me to think that if large companies could be unwittingly using tactics that can get them banned from search engines, I wondered how many small businesses and SEO advisers also suffer from ignorance in this area an actively buy links from any site that will sell them in an attempt to increase their “PageRank” and search engine positions.
This leads me on to the subject of this blog post – how can a small businesses get good quality links that will actually help them increase their organic search engine rankings without paying for them?
Here are a few tips for generating high quality incoming links to your website and are all based on techniques that I have used successfully myself :-
Complimentary sites are those that don’t compete with you directly but are in some way linked to the subject of your site.
For example, if you sell raincoats then a complementary site is one that doesn’t sell raincoats but does sell wellington boots or umbrellas.
You might also obtain links from your local community site, newspaper, local government website, or trade associations. Often they’ll request reciprocating links, but sometimes they won’t and as long as it’s a relevant site that you would be happy sending visitors to then why worry. I know that some SEO “experts” will try to tell you that you should mark your outgoing links as “nofollow” to preserve your sites PageRank, but the author feels that if you are using nofollow as it was originally meant to be used you are saying that you don’t trust the site you are linking to – if you don’t trust it then why are you linking to it in the first place (and you could also argue that if everyone “nofollowed” their external links then you would not have any PR to hoard to start with).
By complimentary sites linking to each other it creates value to their visitors (saves them searching for other sites that are related) and gives valuable incoming links for to help with the search engine positions.
Write Quality Content
You will probably have heard that search engines love fresh content. Write quality articles for your site, or if you have a blog write good quality posts as often as possible. Don’t try to write for the search engines by stuffing keyword phrases into your content, but try to write high quality content that people will want to link to. If you have a blog and a “normal” website, like we do here at Forest Software then don’t forget that you can also cross-link your blog posts and website content as we have done further down in this post.
Write Guest Posts
There are many blogs and content sites that are crying out for people to write articles and blog posts for them. Guest posting on other blogs or content sites are a great way to generate quality incoming links to your website. In addition, they help establish you as an expert in your field which builds credibility with potential clients and customers.
But if you follow this suggestion then make sure that the site or blog that you are writing for is not considered a “content farm” – Google recently updated their ranking process in the USA to devalue these kinds of sites and although it has not yet apparently been rolled out to the rest of the world it will only be a matter of time.
Get Publicity
Of course, getting publicity is harder than it sounds. It’s not just a case of sending out a press release to all the news organisations and magazines that you can think of to get links to your website.
You need to have an interesting story or an innovative product or service then work out which media you are aiming at – local press, national press, specialist or trade magazines (they will all have different interests meaning that some will be interested in your story while others won’t – for example if you are a local accountant and a member of your staff has taken professional exams and qualified in the top 5 in the country then the local and trade press may be interested but the nationals wouldn’t be, make a cake for a royal wedding though and you may well get national media coverage, which leads to extremely high quality incoming links to your website.
Another idea is that if you have a great story to tell, reach out to bloggers and journalists directly – don’t just send out a general a press release (for example our recent post about the Project FUR Japan was the result of a social media posting that asked people to help and as a blogger I responded.
And finally… What ever you do, avoid links from websites with little or no content, or whose content appears to be computer-generated or of very low quality. In the end, those links are very low quality anyway, and it would take thousands of them to make a difference (which is actually what tips the search engines off). Look for quality incoming links, and you’ll be on the road to higher rankings.