Attention! Google sees if you cheat

A common mistake in linkbuilding is collecting as many links as possible as quickly as possible. This creates unnatural link growth, which is penalized by search engines like Google. In addition, Google is becoming increasingly strict regarding so-called “black hat linkbuilding.” Buying links or placing hidden links, for example, falls under black hat linkbuilding. It is seen as cheating.

In linkbuilding, quality is much more important than quantity. Make sure the number of links does not grow too quickly and that the links are of good quality.

Qualitative links

Searching for relevant and reliable websites that want to place a link to your website is a good way to get qualitative and valuable backlinks. Therefore, it is very important to build a network of people who are willing to place your link on their relevant website. Think, for example, of websites that are an established value within your industry.

Blog for interesting content

Of course, you must also have something to offer the other party. This can be placing a link on your website, but also offering interesting content. If you provide interesting content, people are also willing to link to it. You can provide interesting content, for example, by posting blogs. Once you start blogging, people in the market will post comments on your blog and possibly share it via Social Media, thereby obtaining backlinks and automatically spreading the content across the internet.

Or start blogging on other blogs. You then hit two birds with one stone: you can profile yourself to another audience and you can include a link to your own website.

Keywords in the link

Make sure that the text of the link itself, or the text around the link, contains important keywords. The company name is often less suitable than, for example, the product or service you provide. Are you, for example, a plumbing company from Emmen or Zwolle? Then link with the text “plumber Emmen” or “plumber Zwolle” instead of your company name. Such a link is worth more.

Diverse link profile

Qualitative links are important. This does not mean that you cannot obtain any links of lower quality. Search engines also assess a diverse link profile. In addition to links on relevant websites, you can, for example, provide links on start pages, directories, listings in established business directories and portals within your industry. Also look at websites where competitors can be found.

A diverse link profile is created not only by obtaining links on different websites, but also by obtaining different types of links on these websites. For example, provide one-way links, reciprocal links, directory links, social links, links via press releases, links to the homepage, links to underlying pages on the website, follow links and no follow links. No follow links are links that refer to other web pages that should not be followed or crawled by search engine spiders. Follow links refer to web pages where this is the case.

Social linkbuilding

Opinions about the influence of Social Media on the position of websites in search engines are divided. All specialists do agree that Social Media is gaining more and more influence.

Search engines are increasingly taking social signals into account. If the content of your website is referred to via Social Media, search engines take that to mean that “real people” find the website interesting. The more tweets, likes and shares a web page gets, the more interesting the page. It is therefore smart to promote the content via your own Social Media channels and ensure that visitors to the website can easily share the content.

Finally, a number of additional tips:

• Participate in discussions on forums: act as an expert and link to your website
• Donate to or sponsor local charities and non-profit organizations: let them link to your website
• Do you have a webshop? Create a discount code, coupons are popular
• Offer products for review: with a bit of luck they will write about you and refer to your website
• Send out press releases: a news item with a link to your website can quickly spread across the internet
• Administer link requests: this prevents duplicate link requests
• Keep doing linkbuilding to stay high in search engines. Your competitors are not sitting still either!