Link Building Evolved – Best Practices for 2014

While plenty of people in the post-Penguin Google reality would have you assume that link building as a form of helping you rank better in the search engines is dead, we would beg to differ.

While some of the old ways to acquire backlinks to your pages have undoubtedly become toxic, backlinks still mean much, as confirmed by the Google link spam monarch himself, Matt Cutts: “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

Since it’s now crystal clear that the Wild West days of link building are gone, they do still matter, and we’ve come up with some of the best practices for link building in 2014.

Internal linking on your site – Internal linking means the links you have on your own pages that (hopefully) lead to more relevant content on your site. Google views this as a help to your visitors, and as long as you don’t overdo the linkage with tons of excess keyword links, such as extra menus and tag clouds and the like, you’ll have some love too. Link from textual content to other textual content, and use anchor text that makes sense.

Google+ shares – It may not be Facebook yet, but Google+ can get your pages indexed rapidly, and this definitely benefits you in your search rankings.

Think about guest blogging – Long used as a good way to get links and traffic to your pages, think also about being the site that accepts and promotes guest posts. This could be a boon to your own site authority, content and links.

Curate popular content on your own site – Every now and then we find a post or bit of content that has gone viral in our market and is of interest to your readers too. Curate this onto your own blog, giving attribution of course, and encourage your own readers to share it with their social circles, thus sending them to your pages!

Relevance and diversity – Back in the day you could simply obtain a ton of links form almost anywhere and the site with the most won. No so these days! Google rewards relevance now, so relevant links and diverse anchor text are the keys these days!