Links are the most important factor to have good reputation in search engines and to help a website standout in its competition online and it is also the only way for crawlers and user to navigate from one page to another within the website. However, in a complex life of SEO in post penguin era, manufactured links are already considered spammy and manipulative by search engines and could lead to penalties (manual or algorithmic).
The world of SEO has changed; the old ways is no longer tolerated by search engines and now moving in real marketing in a form of content, infographic and videos. Everything that has potential to go viral is now strengthening its way to lead a website authority to success.
Branding
Go branding and think branding. This is what SEO is becoming in the modern way of digital marketing since exact match anchor text is now associated to manipulative activity. Since then, branded links are likely to be the next big thing in SEO which is good because search engine likes brand.
Social Brand Pages
Having branded pages in social media websites can increase your brand visibility online. This will help you increase your audience’s scope area, knowing that social sites have tremendous amount of registered users over millions; this could be a good source of relevant traffic to your website. And at the same time, you will also be able to protect, manage and maintain your brand through your social media presence and take advantage of its benefits such as:
-
Your brand’s presence will be widely visible to massive active social users
-
You can potentially earn links through your social distributions
Branded Links (local)
Local links are good signals to increase and maintain your position in local search results for long tail keywords. Since this type of links is artificial links, it’s a good start up to compete in search optimization in your industry. This would also help you increase your brand visibility in online business listing in your targeted geographic location.
-
10 Free listing sitets by Woorank – With screenshots
Earned links
Earned links are powerful inbound links to any website. Since this gives a website authority and trust by other websites for being mentioned in content of their future publications, search engines would consider these links as legitimate and rightful. Earning links could not be very difficult but there are three ways to help your website
Pitch
The most dominant way of earning links is to be mentioned by journalists to their future publications in high ranking journal sites or business news sites. Since these types of websites have strong daily readership and traffic from organic and social media sites, the possibilities of being discovered by your target audience your website will increase.
Reach out
Contacting people related to your post, topic or website that often write about articles related to your is a good opportunity to help your website increase its exposure by being mentioned on other websites that publish articles related to your website. This could be other website owners, bloggers in your space so that relevancy will still be intact.
You can find these websites by participating in online discussions, news letter and even in blogs who often look other bloggers or writers that can provide them informative articles regularly.
-
Myblogguest.com – Community of bloggers/webmasters looking for contributors.
-
Moz monthly news letter – This contain of top 10 highly remarkable articles by its contributors.
Linkable Asset
Having a linkable asset in your website could help you earn more links by being mentioned of links/people that often right about your linkable asset. This could be a list of resources where your target audience could learn new things, discover influential people in your industry that they can use to their future publications related to your resource page/s which is a good strategy and technique in SEO.
-
Interview list – Venchito of DigitalPhilippines.net expert interviews
-
Definition page of terminologies – Hubspot SEO marketers term
-
Resource page/blog – Jason Acidre’s of Kaiserthesage seo strategies and resources, Beginners guide to SEO, Google algorithm change, Joseph’s link building guide
-
Video series – Rand’s whiteboard Friday
While these changes in SEO concerning links to a website; from old to new tactics, search engines are really pushing forward their guidelines to webmasters to develop quality sites where people are most likely to bookmark, share and reference to on their own without spending most of the time in off-page optimization.