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As the Web progresses, so does the refinement of the top search
engines and the algorithms they utilize to ascertain important
content in cyberspace. Relevant is the key word here, which
means valuable to the searcher and the most likely to be exactly
what they are searching for. Rolling into 2012, search engines
such as Yahoo have begun to understand that keyword matching is
only an aspect of the formula to determine relevancy, and that
the value and the authority level of the web page is turning
into a larger determinant of search relevancy.

That brings us to your link building approach as a webmaster,
small business owner, or online entrepreneur as we commence
2012. The following five link building suggestions get you the
backlinks and relevance you will certainly need this year:

1. Multiple, Applicable Links

All of us want a million backlinks to our blogs, and trust me,
with a little bit of cash, you can get them. There are lots of
linkbuilding deals at Fiverr.com and sites
such as The Hoist that will sell you
literally hundreds of links. Trouble is, Google is looking for
quality which means pages linking to yours must be complementary,
in the same market space, and in some way associated to your
content. Your landing page should somehow be an offshoot of the
ideas presented on the linking site. If that site has to do with
gourmet foods and your page is addressed to unwed parents, that
sort of link will likely not help you a great deal and in fact
can harm your Google rank.

So just how can you get them?

* Get in touch with site owners wanting to swap links for
starters, usually done in a resources page. This is still a
strong technique and has been around for years.

* Leave blog remarks on posts with the same material as yours,
specifically authority sites (more on this later).

* Distribute your original articles for publishing on news and
blog sites that are a normal match to yours.

* Post relevant links to your website on social media portals
like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The best are links to blog
columns or landing pages relevant to Twitter trends or hash-tag
lists and LinkedIn discussion groups.

2. Neighbors Like You

The world of online search is going local and is placing more
and more focus on local sites. Even if your company is not
constricted to where you reside (like an online SEO website that
may be able to work for clients globally), it is more useful
than ever before for local companies to be linking to yours.
Socialize in your Chamber of Commerce and encourage link
exchange, keeping in mind that the more similar these companies
are to yours (and they’re local), the better off you are. If
your SEO establishment is in San Diego, encourage your local
links to say “SEO San Diego” to ensure your link is pertinent
to their audience.

3. Submit Your Work

There are two primary kinds of authority sites in the internet
world: big, highly trafficked, content specific sites (consider
Inc.com, Wall Street Journal), and educational and governmental
sites. Search engines are still giving lots of credit to
university .edu sites and .gov pages, especially the federal
government (who knew).

The major ways to obtain backlinks from these sites are to
provide valuable, one-of-a-kind content in the form of
articles or to post comments to content already on these
websites. If you’re lucky enough to hand in great content
and get yourself published on a high-authority content site,
that is worth its weight in gold to your link building efforts.

Don’t throw away your time with auto-posting, scraping
applications that are going to write nonsense responses for you.
They’ll post, but in most instances will be deleted in the
monitoring of the site. You can browse the web and find listings
of good PR .edu and .gov websites (ones with a PR of 4, 5, 6, 7)
that allow for forum postings with backlinks. Buyer beware and
regularly test the domains, applying PR Checker.

4. Anchor Text Strategy

This is one thing you can most easily control using Article
Marketing tactics, where you submit content for syndication and
publication on high ranking sites. The actual words in your
hyperlink, called anchor text, have to be pertinent to both the
page on the site that is featuring your work and also to the
destination website that the link goes to. That means that, if
you are linking “click here,” you’re skipping half the benefit
of this linking technique.

So how does this work? Going back to our example of the gourmet
cooking site, you publish an article on that blog about your
favorite ways to use cooking sherry, then throughout the body
of the article you link your red wine reduction recipe to, you
guessed it, a webpage that consists of exactly that. Give that
guy a prize!

5. Landing Pages

We just talked about how your landing pages ought to be
pertinent to the link. You ought to also be linking to various
pages on your website, commonly referred to as deep links, and
not only your homepage. This method ought to be easy if your
website is structured properly with a product page for each
product and an article for each idea you may be linking to. This
informs the search engines that your domain is material rich on
numerous pages, and that is vital to you earning the relevance
trophy.

Is doing these things simple? Nope, but that’s exactly the
point. You are doing it the right way, and that practice will
reward link builders in 2012.

About The Author
Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm
that helps small to mid-size professional service firms build
competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. His Smart
Blog covers leadership, business communication, sales service,
online marketing and virtual business, and was recently named
by Buyerzone as one of the Top 20 Business Blogs of 2011. He
is the author of Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership,
has been a featured expert for Inc.com with articles published
in Selling Power, America Online, and SiteProNews to name a few,
and blogs frequently for Rank My Website, a top San Diego SEO
Services firm.

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5 Key Link Building Tactics in 2012

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