9 Ways To Improve Your Link Portfolio

If you have not done so already, you can read part one of this post here.

This is a guest post by Ryan Caldwell. Ryan is a link portfolio artist at SeaWaves Technology, LLC.

Just like a house is made of many parts, which together give the house its character, your link portfolio is really the set of all your links. So how do you make your link portfolio better?

Well, it depends. But here are nine basic principles that I’ve collected by interviewing several top SEO experts:

1. Bait the hell out of new sites

A new site should launch with at least one linkbait per week for the first 3 months. Once you get the hang of crafting a linkbait, you should have no problem gaining massive linkage from Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious and Propeller. Say your site is in the health industry. A linkbait not only provides you the opportunity to score some great .edu and .gov link, but it also removes most patterns that occur when you try to execute your own link building plan.

2. Leave comments at the most popular posts on the most popular blogs in your niche

First, identify the top 5 sites in your niche. Let’s say your blog is about blogging and making money. For argument’s sake, we’ll take Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow, Performancing and Entrepreneur’s Journey as the top 5.

Second, identify their top 5 blogs posts. There are many ways to do this, but for the sake of quickness (and relying on multibillion dollar companies), you could use Yahoo Site Explorer which tends to list what it perceives as the most important articles on a site first.

Third, make intelligent comments. Hopefully they have the URL field open. Don’t worry if links are nofollow in their comments. Doesn’t matter.

3. Increase Randomness / Remove Patterns

Patterns emerge from non-natural link manipulation. What if 90% of your home was made out of fabric? Not good. Any home builder knows that the majority of your house should be built out of a solid, long lasting material. They’d know something was amiss if 90% of your home was built from fabric. The same goes for search engines. Search engines consider your site against ideal link portfolio archetypes. If something is way off, you’ll get penalized.

So how do you remove patterns? Well, for one, you use high doses of linkbait. But you can also define an “ideal” natural link portfolio and model your link-building methods around it. See below for some examples.

4. Get Exponentially More Links From Weaker Sites Than Stronger Sites

Under a natural temporal progression, a good site will have more links from weaker sites than from strong sites. You can track this natural progression by simply not committing the common error of only trying to get high PageRank links. A good quality site with PageRank 3 might just be a diamond in the rough.

5. Pay attention to temporal momentum

A new site should not show up one day with 50,000 backlinks out of the blue. A slow start, with progressively exponential growth for the first year is natural and a sign of health. Pace out your acquisition of links and don’t do it all at once. A daily or weekly schedule can do wonders for executing this model.

6. Solicit (or Buy) Tightly Focused Blogroll Links

Against the judgement of many, let me suggest that it is very natural to get run of site blogroll links from other sites in your niche. Just make sure they are quality sites with quality content. an easy and natural way to get these sort of links is a reciprocal link exchange. Please…forget all the bad information out there. Semantically relevant reciprocal links are not a zero-sum game. They are almost always good for both parties. Just make sure that you balance recips with one-ways, etc.

7. Limited article directory and press release submission doesn’t hurt and might help

You don’t want article directory submissions or press releases to be the dominant part of your link portfolio, but they don’t hurt, and can add to portfolio diversification. And if done under natural circumstances, with newsworthy material, press releases can actually turn into their own form of linkbait if news organizations or related companies pick up on the news. Make sure to mention other companies in your press release and you’re almost guaranteed to get a thank you, as well as a link.

8. Submit your site to about five quality directories

Quality is the key here. Google doesn’t take most directories seriously, but there are a few that I recommend such as Yahoo, StartingPoint, DMOZ, BlogCatalog, EatonWeb, Best of the Web.

9. Increase site visibility by getting easy quality links in moderation

Don’t overdue it, but you can easily get links from wordpress.com, blogger.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.com, squidoo.com and the list could go on forever. It doesn’t really matter if the links are redirects or nofollows. You want to focus on domain visibility.

What to avoid

The two most important rules to follow when creating a strong link portfolio are 1) diversify your methods and 2) use moderation when taking the “easy” steps. If you have too many links from a single domain, or if you get too many run-of-site links too quickly, your link portfolio is going to look like the frame of a house without a foundation. Search engines are now capable of seeing this.

• Don’t spam wikipedia.com (though you might add a few quality, relevant links)
• Don’t spam wordpress.com (though you might setup a few quality supplemental blogs)
• Don’t spam blogspot.com
• Don’t submit your site to 100 directories (most of them will be seen as junky link farms)
• Don’t slap your domain up on one site’s blogroll and then stop
• Don’t just go after PR 5+ links (though a few are fine)
• Don’t just build comment links
• Don’t just rely on blog network links
• Don’t just rely on purchased links (though in moderation, they are fine)
• Don’t just rely on social media and short term links

The key is to pace all of your link building activities out over time and to diversify the “building materials” or type of links that you use so that everything seems as natural as possible.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts.

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