- Pick your battles wisely. A very competitive keyword requires great link building and may take years to see ROI.
- First focus on getting your onsite SEO as good as possible. This is about 20% of successful ranking and you will not be penalized for it so long as you don't over do it.
- Make sure you have a clear understanding of what a natural link profile looks like before starting any link building and try to mimic natural.
- Aim to limit anchor texts (money keywords) to about 15% of the overall backlink profile.
- Focus more on links that pass authority to your site rather than links with highly optimized anchor text.
- Stop counting links - more links does not always equal improved ranking.
- In the beginning try to build every link by hand - later you can speed things up.
- Be very careful of SEO services, especially cheap ones as most are junk.
- Build less links. I've been looking at how many links legitimate sites receive and most don't receive that many. Certainly not 1000's in a few months.
- Don't build a wall of dead end links i.e. 1000's of links pointing to your site that have no backlinks of their own.
- Build links to your links and go a few layers deep.
- Make most backlink anchor text to the root domain or brand.
- Aim for about 20% nofollow links.
- Build links that have traffic value and not just ranking value.
- Buffer dangerous links (i.e. Private Blog Network links) and don't point them directly to your site. Keep them a few tiers back and mix in other niche links.
- Stay away from spun content and if you do spin make sure it's by hand, at word & sentence level.
- When using content for links ask yourself - does this read like spam? if the answer is 'yes' then improve the content.
- Avoid tools like Senuke X, AMR, Scrapebox & Xrumer. These tools are designed to create mass links and that's just not natural.
- Avoid blasting links to tier 2 / 3 etc - they all lead back to one site in the end; better to avoid blasts of any kind.
- Future proof your link building. Shortcut methods that work today may be slapped down tomorrow.
- Blend your backlinks by weaving in links to other authority sites related to your niche.
- Sign up to SEO Majestic or similar and monitor your backlink profile to make sure it resembles natural.
- Get unique content for your posts. Either hand write it or use a service like iwriter.
- Don't ping your links - how low quality is a link if you need to ping it relentlessly to get Google to acknowledge it.
- Make your site/content useful and attract as many natural links as possible.
- Try to make your site as white hat as possible and approach any fabricated link building like watering down beer.
- Avoid Private Blog Networks that have a name.
- Avoid chasing the loophole - every loophole is closed down in the end and if you've made it your main SEO strategy you will find yourself back at square one.
- Make sure links are from numerous sources thus increasing link diversity and IP's.
- Don't over optimize keywords on site or off site.
- Make sure link velocity is varied - a steady link velocity just isn't natural.
- Maintain a balance between links to inner pages and the home page.
- Capture long tail traffic with plenty of hand written, well researched content.
- If most of your links are artificial don't use Google Analytics.
- Practice patience and think if IM and SEO in terms of years. Next year this will make decent money.
May these tip helps you...
