CIO.com recently came out with an article called 10 Online Reputation Management Tips for Businesses. Among their top 10 was developing quality links to your content.  If “Content is King”, then link-building is Queen. Your content might be excellent, but if your link-building strategy is sub-par, far fewer people are going to view it.

One of the touchiest SEO topics is link-building strategy.  The wording CIO used for this topic is exactly the way we need to think about building links: “Get Other Sites to Link to Yours with Anchor Text – But Don’t Overdo It.” The reason this is such an on point message for link-building is that people often fall into “get rich quick” schemes.  The folks at Google are very good at finding black hat (questionable but effective) search engine optimization techniques and writing them out of subsequent algorithm updates.  The best online marketing is going to involve a lot of time and hard work.

Keep in mind, the number of links to your content is not nearly as important as the quality of those links.  Links should be from sites with high reputations and high engagement.  It’s also important that the link context is taken into account.  For example the link at the top of this article has keyword-rich anchor text.  When reading blogs, you’ll frequently see single words like “article” or “study” linked.  In order to optimize your search results, there should be keywords in the hyperlink.  However if the exact same phrase is used too often, there may be penalties and Google might drop your search rank.

These are the points you should remember when developing your link-building strategy:

  1. Seek high traffic, engagement rich, websites that are industry specific
  2. Ensure that links back to your content are keyword-rich, and that the text is varied
  3. Never buy large blocks of links
  4. Work hard!