Staying off the Google Radar

When you are working on your link building campaign, it’s easy to get overzealous and make simple errors that could wind up penalizing you, particularly with Google.  Google is considered to be the largest and most powerful search engine in the market, therefore it’s understandable that you want to do everything possible to avoid getting slapped around by them and suffering a penalty to your site listing.

Most users head for Google for even the simplest searches, and with smart phones exploding in popularity, this year people are using the new Google enhanced local search to find everything they need.

You’ll want to build a profile of your site before starting any campaign to create and obtain backlinks.   Make sure you know where your existing links are coming from and the number of total inbound links.  Once you’re there, follow these recommendations to get started

• Keep your building pace slow – New links to your site shouldn’t exceed more than 8-10% of your existing links.  IE:  If you have upwards of 300 links to your site, you should be able to add up to 30 new links in place for your site without apprehension.  On the other side, if you get aggressive and build 80 to 100 new links in a month for a site that only has 250 existing links than you may be viewed as someone who is obtaining links unnaturally, or through spammy methods.

• Page Targeting – Too often business create links to the home page of the site, but this hurts listings because the home page doesn’t contain the most relevant content for targeted keyword phrases.  You should make sure that you build links to the relevant content on your site, and take the time to put up SEO rich content on all your pages.

• Deep links = Natural Links – The best results will come from pushing a campaign that will setup approx 60% of all your incoming links to hit pages other than your homepage.  This is a bold characteristic of sites with a high rank.

• Including your business info – Your link building campaign should focus on your company, and it’s important to include the name of the company or service and the domain name.  Use it within the anchortext.  This creates a more stable, solid backlink profile and has a more natural look when Google starts rolling over your site and content with its Big Brother eyeball.

• Create dynamic content – The more content you have that is relevant to your keywords, the more opportunities you have for target anchor text.  Having quality pages on your site optimized around numerous keyword phrases generates a higher deep link ratio at a much faster rate.  A blog is a great way to regularly generate dynamic content for future linking purposes, and will generate a more uniform link profile for your site overall.

When working with a new site, the rules change a little.  Google is good about recognizing link ratios where new sites are considered compared to existing sites that have had a stable, steady increase in links and then suddenly spike.

Thanks to strong technology, Google performs well when weeding out garbaged-up spammy link campaigns and social media explosion from viral content.

You should be able to effectively storm the net with an appropriate link building campaign for somewhere between 90 and 120 days before you need to consider making cuts in the number of link acquisitions you make.

Related posts:

1. Building Links through Guest Blogging
2. Advanced SEO – Examining Social Media Outreach
3. Link-Building Strategies for Online Marketing
4. SEO for Newbies
5. Priming the Local Search Engine