4 Steps to Good Link Building SEO

Link Building SEO, Like the Experts

As published by Social Media Today.

I’m really getting into SEO lately, and specifically, the undeniable relationship between SEO and inbound marketing.  Or more specifically, good link building SEO practice and inbound marketing.

Among the various tools and strategies, link building is the one very essential for good website page ranking.   These are some of the strategies used by SEO experts.

4 Expert Strategies

#1  Remarkable Content

First thing’s first, long gone are the days of random and out-of-context link exchanges as a method to improve website ranking.  Essential to link building SEO and inbound marketing is the mandate that you develop exceptional content worthy of being remarked upon by others.  Experts don’t merely write content with high quality, they make it compelling.  Because as a discerning reader, you’ll choose to digest content that you perceive as valuable.  And this is the type of content you’ll link to, or share with others.

#2  Schmooze with the Right Audience

Build your own reputation around your niche as early as possible.  It takes time to build and to expose your brand to the public, but one effective way to do so is in promoting your content to those who have already established themselves as experts on their fields.  Befriend experts within your industry, and do so with compelling content.

“Go niche and dominate…your efforts will be far more successful if you become the authority in a smaller niche, rather than one among many in a broader topic.” – Aviva Directory

So how do you get to know these folks?  One way is to visit their blog and leave valuable commentary.  The type that generates a response.  Target these same experts through social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and don’t be bashful to be sure that they know you are following them.  Then build your relationships with them spontaneously by sharing their content to social networks, and for sure you’ll get appreciated in the future.  Promote your blog comments with tools like Commentluv, Disqus & Keywordluv.  All this builds relevant traffic to your site and organic SEO.

#3  Make Content Linkable

This is the most important step of all.  Make sure that once you’ve captivated your reader, perhaps even inspired them to comment, that they can easily share or link to your posts easily. Make sure social network widgets are visible at the end of your content post.  You can also place codes that will allow your readers to link to your posts at the bottom of each entry.  In this way you are letting your readers do the SEO for you.

#4  Shoot It Through the Social Content Publishing Circuit

Lastly, experts leverage the best social content voting and publishing tools to promote their content and generate valuable links.  Sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and reddit all hold high page rank value.  This makes them extremely valuable for link building.  Write good content, categorize it with the appropriate key words and in the right categories, and people who like to digest good articles will get to them via these sites.  The better your content, the more organic linking will occur between social publishing sites, readers and reader’s blogs.

“The adoption of social media widgets – including tools used for social networking, micro-blogging, bookmarking, and photo sharing – grew 80% from 2009 to 2010. Widget adoption specifically related to Facebook and Twitter almost doubled, growing from 6.96% to 11.86%.” – Lijit

In the end, good link-building practice is an art form.  And as SEOmoz writes, link building is one of the most difficult activities to measure, particularly from a search engine optimization perspective.  While search engines have a precise way about measuring their value, it’s difficult for the marketer to easily to the same.   Use your website’s analytics to determine whether you’re seeing increases in search traffic via increases in referring link traffic.  Those are the indicators of an effective, well-managed, SEO campaign.