Tag: links

How to Create an Organic-Looking Links

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Natural links are the best

The best type of links to build for any website, is one that looks natural and organic and doesn’t appear to have been bought or bargained for. Natural looking links are the ones that are designed to look as though they developed by the referring site naturally and without the intervention of an SEO company, or even your own SEO efforts.


The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t want to see companies or site owners cheating the variables to get to the top of the search engine results page. Rather, it wants to see websites that are genuinely so authoritative and well written that they will attract links from other big sites and that they’ll be shown across social media.


So how do you ensure that your links profile looks natural in this way?

Vary Your Link Text

The anchor text that is the words that are underlined when you create a link. Using a SEO relevant anchor is absolutely crucial. Back in the day, the easiest way to make this work was by generating as many links as possible, all using the same search term, in other words spamming the anchor text. This helped Google to identify that your site was relevant specifically to that search keyword and thus it used to help you climb the ​rankings.


But that was much too easy to cheat and the smarter, Penguin-powered Google now looks at this as a sign of a company or site owner trying to game the system. This is very easy to identify also – if all of the links to a website are consistently using the exact same text in their anchors, then this is very likely to have been the work of a marketer or SEO practitioner rather than happen by natural occurrence.

To solve this problem, make sure that the links you create use a variety of different words and terms. Sometimes you should use your keyword. Sometimes you should use a synonym or version of your keyword. And sometimes you should use your URL, or just the word ‘here’ or 'click here'. 

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Vary Your Link Locations

Google has made it clear that site owners should build high quality links rather than a large quantity of links. Quality beats quantity especially when Google is concerned. Thus, a lot of marketers and site owners have been focusing all their efforts on targeting top blogs and other high quality websites. Meanwhile, they disavow any smaller links.

But now consider how this actually looks. Imagine a site like the BBC or Bodybuilding.com. Do you think these sites only have links from the most reputed sources? Or do you think they have a few low quality ones thrown in there too?


As you can see, variety is actually a key indicator of a genuine, organic link profile.

Link Bait

What is the best way to get all these natural looking links? Educate your users to post them! The best way to do that is with ‘link bait’ – content that is so high quality, so shareable, that people will want to link to it of their own.

And there are also some strategies you can use to create link bait too – for instance, making your content a comprehensive resource that other posts can point too.

Guest Posting Done Right

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Guest Posting for SEO

While no SEO technique is ideal, guest posting is perhaps the most reliable and useful tool for building links that is available to marketers today.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, guest posting simply involves creating links to your website from external blogs and sites by providing them with free content. You write a post or article for a blog or a website and then send it to them and let them publish it on the agreement that you can include a link to your own website in it.
As a result, they get free content and you get a link back to your site. Everyone wins…
But as with any tool, it’s all about how you use it…


Tip 1: Not Too Much

The first vital tip to keep in mind is that you just mustn’t overdo guest posting – like any other SEO strategy, a good links profile is one that appears ‘natural’ and therefore you don’t need an excessive amount of any similar ‘type’ of links. Use guest posts and additional alternative methods to create your link profile in a broader strategy.

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Tip 2: Choose Authority Blogs

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Probably the most important factor to consider when getting guest posts is the type of blog that your link is going to end up on. The best option is to get your links on authority blogs and sites.
Authority blogs and sites are those that Google trusts as an authority already and these will thus be able to act much more effectively as useful ‘testimonies’ as to the quality of your site.

One excellent way to find high authority blogs is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. This will show you sites that Google trusts enough to feature reporting on breaking news. If you can get a link from one of these, it can help you a great deal.
Another tip is to look at the links profile of the blog you’re planning on submitting content to. Trust for Google works a little like ‘degrees of separation’ and if the blog linking to you has a link from a .edu site, or high authority site, for example, then this can result in more trust for you too!

Tip 3: Excellent Content

The post you write is highly important. It needs to be high quality, not only so that it sends more of the right message to Google, but also to encourage other high authority blogs to want to link to you (it’s also important to ensure your branding is strong for the same reason).
At the same time, you need to write high quality content that is directly related to the topic of your website. This is important because you want to communicate the topic of your blog to Google and make the links more relevant. Google insists that all in-bound links be highly relevant. What’s better than having a your link embedded into a post that you wrote?

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