Visibility

Link building is the most important part of an SEO campaign, making up more than 90% of your ranking success. White-hat link building strategies are those strategies that add value to the end user, abide by Google’s terms of service and produce results that are sustained over the long term. Here are 14 white-hat link building strategies that will help you achieve top SEO rankings...

1. Write Quality Articles - writing quality articles is critical for driving natural incoming links into your site. The better the article, the more links you will get. The best types of articles are those that educate your audience on a problem they are trying to solve or a solution they are after. The best style of articles are lists (e.g. top 10 lists), case studies (e.g. Barack Obama's online marketing campaign) and how-to articles (e.g. how to achieve top SEO rankings).

2. Use A Wordpress Blog - using a blog on your website (e.g. www.yoururl.com/blog) is a great way of building internal links to the pages you want to rank highly for in the search engines. Post a quality article to your blog every week and make sure to link to your 'money' pages within the article itself (note: a link within the body of an article or web page is referred to as a contextual link and is the highest value link you can build). Aside from the internal linking benefits a blog provides, it also keeps your website fresh (which helps it appear higher up in the time-based searches on Google), it increases the size of your site and the PageRank you control, and it includes an RSS feed that can automatically Ping the search engines to let them know when a new article is posted. The best blogging platform to use is Wordpress because of the SEO customizations available.

3. Use Social Bookmarking Sites - posting articles to your blog is a great first step, but to really build exposure to your articles you will need to start promoting them online. Sharing your articles on social bookmarking sites will put them in front of millions of people each day. If the title of the article is good enough you will get a lot of exposure for your articles and will receive natural links from people that find your articles valuable. The best social bookmarking sites to use include digg.com, stumbleupon.com, delicious.com and reddit.com. You can also search for social bookmarking sites in your niche.

4. Share Your Articles on Facebook and Twitter - you can also build exposure to your articles by sharing them on Facebook and Twitter. Open up a Facebook Company Page and start sharing your content there. Do the same on Twitter. In the spirit of social networking, make sure to share other valuable content as well (not just yours). Add Tweetmeme and Facebook Like buttons to your blog to make it easier for your readers to share your content as well. Remember, the more people that see your article the more links you will get, as long as the article is of the highest quality.

5. Use Article Directories - you can submit your articles to article directories such as ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com and allow other website owners to republish the article on their site for their visitors, in exchange for a link back to your site. You can then follow up with any websites that have republished your article and become a guest blogger. If you are going to submit the same articles you posted on your blog to the article directories, make sure the article is indexed on your blog first so you have ownership of the article in the search engine's eyes, avoiding any duplicate content issues.

6. Become A Guest Blogger - you can contact blogs in your industry and offer to write them a guest blog post. Depending on the blog you write for you can get massive exposure to your own site just be appearing on the blog. If you can, include a link back to your website within the body of the article (i.e. a contextual link). At the very least you should be able to include a short bio at the end of the article, which is where you can place a link. To find guest blogging opportunities you can use sites such as Technorati.com or Google Blog Search.

7. Integrate Link Building Into Your Service Offering - while it isn't an easy thing to do, if you can find a way to integrate link building into your service offering then you will be unstoppable. Web designers include a link back to their site in the footer area of every site they design. Hosting companies give away free website templates to their customers in exchange for a link in the footer area of the sites they are giving away. Companies that host award ceremonies give a badge that winners can proudly use on their site with a link back to the page which confirms what they won. Payment companies offer discounts on monthly fees in exchange for include a logo on client's home page with a link back to their site. You get the idea...

8. Submit Your Site To Website Directories - while bulk directory submissions are not very effective, getting your website listed in local directories and high authority directories can help your SEO rankings. Look for directories in your country and in your industry and get listed there. Also look for high value paid directories, such as the Yahoo Directory, and get listed there as well. One of the best ways to find website directories to get listed in is to research your competitors' backlinks and submit your website to all the directories they are listed in.

9. Join Associations & Memberships - many industry associations and membership organizations include a page on their site with a list of members and a link to their websites. Depending on the organization you join this page can be very valuable from an SEO perspective. Find industry associations and membership organizations in your industry and check the Member Benefits page to see if you get listed on their site. If you do then you can be sure to get a quality link by being a member.

10. Give Testimonials - if you have recently bought a product or service and are happy with it, then you can contact the company and offer to give them a testimonial and include a link back to your website in the testimonial. A word of warning, do not just give testimonials in exchange for links - make sure that the testimonial is an honest one. Aside from the legal implications of giving false testimonials in exchange for a financial benefit, your credibility will be severely impacted if you give testimonials for less than quality products or services.

11. Add More Web Pages To Your Site - the more pages you have on your site the more PageRank you will have and the more internal links you will control. A blog is a great way to add more pages on your site, but you can also add more standard web pages to your site as well, creating web pages focused on specific keywords, services or products. The more pages you have the more you will be able to control your own SEO rankings. Just look at Wikipedia!

12. Create Link Bait - link bait is a term coined by the SEO industry describing a piece of content or information that is so valuable or controversial that it gets hundreds, even thousands, of natural links from other websites. Examples of link bait include leaked photos of new technology (e.g. the iPad), breaking news ahead of anyone else, sharing really powerful strategies that have never been shared before, or giving away free products (e.g. a free Macbook). Creating link bait is not an easy task but if you can pull it off you can build a high number of quality links in a very short period of time.

13. Create A Viral Marketing Campaign - a viral marketing campaign is a form of link bait, but it goes the extra bit further by being so amazing that people who are exposed to it pass it on to all of their friends. Rather than getting links straight to your site, your viral marketing campaign will travel around the Internet on its own building exposure to your company and brand. You will get links as a result, but the focus is on building exposure to a product or service, rather than building links. Viral marketing success is difficult to achieve.

14. Submit Press Releases - if you have something newsworthy that media outlets will be interested in publishing you can submit a press release online and get the news out there. Using sites like PRWeb.com and other online press release sites can be okay, but for maximum performance you may want to go for the professional syndication services and get a professional writer to write your release. If you can get your release published by a newspaper or magazine then you will get great exposure for your company as well as links into your site.