We know that our previous guide about SEO gave you a sneak peek into how one should be doing SEO and not get distracted by thousands of blog posts misleading you. And now you are hungry for more. Most importantly, you want to know what type of links you should be building to get your website on the first page.
We all agree on one thing, all links were never created equal. And that’s what confuses everyone because they do not know what type of links they should be building to rank higher. For instance, a dofollow link might prove better than a nofollow link in some cases. But you do not know that. And in another case, a redirected link might hold little to no value for your website.
My philosophy is that you should always have a mixture of all types of links. But obviously, you need to focus more on the right type of links and less on the complementary links.
So, here I will be detailing the types of links I have been building for my clients and have gotten sweet results. Based on what you learn here today, you can decide which types of links you want to focus more on.
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Purely SEO Value Links (SERP Elevation)
These links are only built to get your website ranking higher for a particular set of keywords. Usually, these links are dofollow links from pages that are relevant to the topic of your website.
If you are building these, you want to make sure that you are using your target keyword as the anchor text. This will help the search engines know that your website is relevant to that topic and they should rank your higher for that keyword.
There are a couple different ways to get these dofollow links from relevant pages. Blog commenting, guest posting, etc are just some of the techniques you can use to achieve that.
Again, you want to make sure that you are creating these links in moderation. If you go overboard, you run a chance of being penalized and we want to avoid that at all costs.
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Links That Generate Traffic
These types of links usually do not help you with your SERP (Search Engine Rankings Page) results in any shape or form. By what they do is give your website the exposure on pages that receive a lot of traffic. The expectation from doing this is that if that page is getting a lot of traffic, by linking from it to your website, you might receive some traffic as well.
There are several different forms of traffic generating links that can vary from banner ads, forum posts, blog comments, popular directories, and text links of course.
If you want to find out how much traffic does a website get and the demographics, you can use 2 free tools: Compete and Google AdPlanner.
This data will only help you decide whether it will be fruitful for you to place a link on that website or not.
One thing you should keep in mind is that traffic generating links can either be free or paid. They can also be dofollow or nofollow links. So if you are planning to create these types of links, you want to make sure that you are okay with the type of link that you will be receiving.
But the overall goal here is very clear: you want to get a link from a website that is receiving a lot of visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
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Links that Boost PageRank
People still debate whether PageRank is important for a website or not and whether or not Google is still updating it. Even though Google has clearly stopped updating it since 2013, I still see SEO’s care about this metric. And it is for a good reason.
The obvious sign is that the websites that used to have higher PageRank (PR), still rank high to this day. While there might be other factors at play here, but it is hard to ignore that fact.
So maybe it is a good thing to build links in order to increase your PR. Because while Google might not consider it as one of their factors, you might end up influencing a couple of different factors and end up ranking higher.
So how do you build links that increase your PageRank?
It’s simple. You create dofollow links from pages that are relevant to your website. You also have to make sure that you are creating links from websites that already have a high PageRank.
How do you find websites with high PageRank?
It’s simple, you can try out SEO Quake for Firefox. This little AddOn can easily help you sort your search results based on PageRank.
Once you find the websites on which you want to create links from, you can then refer back to point #1 and build links via link requests, directory submissions, blog comments, etc.
Again, it is best not to go overboard with this thing. Staying in moderation and using a bunch of keywords is the key here.
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Reputation Links
The primary goal behind these type of links is to build a good reputation for your company or brand.
Ever heard of SEO based Reputation Management?
These are the links that are used by people who provide that service.
These links have your name or your company name as the anchor text. And these links are not just built for your main website, they are already created for your blogs, social profiles and everything that might be affiliated with you or your brand.
How is this helpful?
Well, think about it.
When you search for a celebrity’s name, you only find the good results about them on the first 3-4 pages of Google.
Do you think that’s a coincidence?
I beg to differ. That is intentionally done to make sure that their reputation stays intact on the internet. And this is how they do it.
Reputation management is one of the hardest things to deliver in the SEO marketplace. That’s mainly because it goes way beyond just creating social profiles for your brand. You need to build links to these social profiles so that they rank higher.
Not only that, you might also need to use them in your forum signatures, add them to relevant directories, etc.
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Backlinks for Your Backlinks
These are the types of links that give your website solid power to rank higher in SERPs. When you create backlinks to your social profiles, to the pages that are linking to your website, etc. you are only creating your own links much more powerful.
One of the best and easiest ways to do this is to bookmark your pages once you create or get a link from them. This will not only empower them, but it will also help you keep track of all the links that you have created.
The bookmarking will also notify the search engine crawlers about a new page being added. And they will be checking out your link as well.
Conclusion
To end this I will say that it must look natural to Google. It doesn’t matter which type of link you choose to create. You absolutely need to make sure that it looks completely natural. If it doesn’t, then you risk getting penalized.
What’s the best way to do that?
Mix everything. Your anchor texts, types of links that you build, your methods, etc. Everything.
That is the only way you can ensure that your website never gets penalized.
