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Home » The Famous Blog » Link Building for Small Business, A Quick and Practical Strategy

Link Building for Small Business, A Quick and Practical Strategy

November 27, 2011 - Last Modified: March 28, 2013 by Al

Link Building for Small Business

Link building is one of the most time consuming parts of SEO but it remains to be one of the most important factors of having a successful SEO campaign.

As a San Diego Based SEO consultant, link building is one of the services I offer to my clients.

If you own a small business, I recommend you look into the following tactics and see which one you haven’t done and or you could improve on.

White Hat Link Building Tactics

Article Submission Sites

I have a list of refined and high quality article submission sites that I submit my articles to with contextual links to them linking back to the websites I am linking building for. I keep my article submission sites updated and I make sure I submit my articles only to very selected high quality article sites and I make sure each post is unique only for that site.

Press Releases

If my client has newsworthy content, I send it over wires as press releases. Press releases can get you a few good relevant links but the main advantage is that they can get the attention of other writers and they may write about you. I have seen that happen over and over and it did last week for my client.

Guest Blogging

There are many blogs that are in need of fresh content for their blogs and by writing a unique quality content for their website, they may allow you to drop a link back to your website in that post.  

Link Exchange

Link exchange, if done moderately still works. The key is to stay relevant to your industry and not over do it.

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting, if done on relevant websites and if done in non spammy way, still works. Even the comment links have nofollow tags which  prevent search engines from following them, they still generate good traffic and are needed for a good link profile showing the search engines you are pretty active in your own community. Also they can grab other webmasters attention to your website and they may link to you if they like you or your website.

Forums

Participating in relevant forums and linking back to your website in the signature works. Again the key is to stay relevant to your website and your industry. They also help you find other websites who would do link exchanges with you or would like to link to you.

Blogger Network

I recommend businesses to reach out to bloggers within their own industry and build a relationship with them so when they have a product or service they want them to review, they can simply ask them. Most bloggers will review your products or services for free if you have a good relationship with them.

Social Media Links

Make sure you have social media accounts and are active on them. Also make sure you drop links of your website there as social media is a good way to attract links, which we SEOs call link-bait.

Gray Hat Link Building Tactics

The following methods are in the gray area of Google guidelines violation which is why we SEOs call them gray hat. I tend not to follow these methods for my clients but I have done them in the past when I worked as an in house SEO for some of my employers. Mainly because the field my last employer was in was too competitive and it was also hard to get fresh natural links on a regular basis.

Paid Reviews

Paid links are against Google’s guidelines and are considered black hat but paid reviews are not. As long as you don’t pay for a link, you should be ok. But that puts you in a gray spot because people that review often tend to link. So, you must make sure you do this in a  manner that looks natural to Google. If you all have a ton of reviews that have the same or similar anchor texts, then that could look very unnatural and could trigger some sort of spam filter with Google or simply your competitor .

Three way links

This method may not sound gray at all but it is. It is basically link exchange done in a sneaky way. The way it works is that you basically have a main website, let’s call it site A, and a supportive website, let’s call it Site B. Then you reach out to others and ask them to link to your main website site A and in exchange you link to them from Site B. That way you don’t leave a trace of direct link exchange because too much link exchange could be considered spammy.  This method works pretty well and unless you get reported by your competitors or someone in Google webspam team finds out, chances are it will go unnoticed.

Link Buying for satellite sites

Link buying is against Google guidelines and if you buy links for your main website I highly recommend you rethink your strategy. If you really need to buy links, I recommend you set up supportive sites and mirror sites. You can buy links from those websites, increasing their page rank and authority, and then link from those sites to your main website. This is another method that works well, but it is has its own risks as your competitor may find out this tactic and report you to Google webspam team and you may get penalized. It could also get very expensive so  I recommend you do this moderately if you need to.

Conclusion

link building should be part of small business strategy because getting links naturally is hard and in my opinion near impossible for small businesses. However, I highly recommend you follow Google guidelines and stay white hat in this effort. If you have to cross into the gray area, just be careful!

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Filed Under: Online Business, SEO

About Al

Follow @asefati

Techie, an Enterprise SEO Consultant, and Digital Marketer, Entrepreneur and MBA (specifically in that order). My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sefati/

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{ 21 Responses }

  1. Ben Hawkshaw-Burn says:
    Hey this article has been very informative and so has the comments! I do think that finding the right sites/blogs to comment on is the first big step. I usually use Post Rank to find my topics of interests, which of course are mostly SEO, and I manage to grab a list of some of the most popular blogs on that topic based on the amount of social interaction and comments those blogs receive. Have any of you guys used this before or anything similar? How do you find your relevant blogs and websites based on your niche? Cheers Ben
  2. prabhat says:
    guest posting,guest posting and guest posting..i always hear this term though i have never tried it. but yes, i am thinking about it. links are an essential part of your overall SEO and blog reputation. it can decide the fate of a blog. good links can give you good customers. thanks for the ideas and tips
  3. Trung Nguyen says:
    As a new blogger who wants to get more free traffic by search engines optimizing, I'm trying to find a best strategy to do link buidling, in that post, I found many new ways, guest posting is great however, I'll do blog commenting more often, it's easier way than guest blogging :)
  4. Amit says:
    As a small business owner myself, I couldn't agree with you more. It is hard and time consuming to build links. I try and do most of the link building myself by engaging with my peers/visitors online and also use some tools to make the process less time consuming.
  5. Saksham Talwar says:
    I like all the link building ways you've mentioned above and guest posting is my favorite among all of them. BTW, is your article directory (http://famousbloggers.info/) no longer active? I think you should promote it :)
  6. Abhi Balani says:
    I never knew that "Three way links", it's good idea. Thanks for sharing this informative post.
  7. Anthony says:
    I had never thought to try the "three way linking" strategy but it doesn't seem like Google would have that difficult of a time figuring out since you're working from subdomains. I understand that subs are often treated as "different" sites, but I don't think I would feel comfortable doing this that frequently. Though as you stated I could see it being effective in moderation.
    • Al Sefati says:
      hey Anthony Thanks for commenting on my post. I never mentioned subdomains perhaps I should have been clearer; I was referring to Satellite sites. For example www.yourmainwebsite.com is site A in this example and your www.satellitesite.com is your supportive site. Both on diffrerent domain, ip, hosting. You get links to your mainwebsite and lin kout from your satellite website. But in long run, I like building relationships to get natural links instead of artificial creating links which is the next post I am working on :)
  8. Abel Pardo says:
    I really think that link building is one of the most refinated arts that exisits. Also, I guess that big corporations are making black hat link building without any penalisation, so we, simple humans, have to develop incredible strategies for reaching the little space they left free.
    • David says:
      I too think that most of the top companies use black-hat strategies on their site promoting. They are not chasing the white hat tricks just to save the advertising methods like adsense. All they want is good targeted traffic. Until they are getting that, their ultimate goal is achieved.
      • Abhi Balani says:
        So, is it right? Like if you don't use adsense and use black hat tricks. then?
  9. Michael says:
    Blog commenting has proven to be very effective for me in gaining backlinks and boosting SERP's. I actually saw a method of getting a blog post indexed which advocated blog commenting over social network updating. I suspect Google Fresh could be responsible.
  10. Ewan Kennedy says:
    Hi Al, Your post is an excellent reminder that the old tried and tested techniques may still work but it is becoming more important than ever to keep a balanced approach i.e. not focus on one particular technique to the exclusion of all others.
    • Al Sefati says:
      I agree Ewan, Its all about diversity. I am still getting sites indexed using nofollow links even though Google said they don't follow nofollow links but evidence clearly shows they do. So perhaps they keep changing their algorithm? anyway thanks for reply. My next post(s) will be more advanced link building methods.
      • Ewan Kennedy says:
        Al, We know they (Google) follow the "nofollow" links so they can presumably be effective in terms of indexing content. They only assert that they don't pass page rank through nofollowed links. I haven't seen anywhere any claim that they don't actually follow the links.
  11. bizspeedy says:
    Hey Sefati, I really liked the part when you discussed do and don’ts of link building strategy, and especially the part about to follow Google guidelines. Really helped me improve my small businesses!
  12. Mark says:
    Al - Thanks for the awesome post. For a newbie like me, it was great to finally find a simple overview to linking strategies. Question: I am developing two blogs at the same time. One is for entrepreneurs who need to know about accounting and taxation. The other is for accountants and accounting students. I am linking each page to the other. Would this hurt my Google scores? Thanks, Mark
    • Al Sefati says:
      hey Mark...no in my opinion. Both are relevant topics and should be good. Direct link exchanges hurt when you "over do it" and often happens when you do link exchange with non relevant blogs. It this case it seems that you are doing neither so imo you should be OK.
  13. Al Sefati says:
    @heydevesh thank you. Yes guest posting IMO is a great way to build links but you have to think about link profile. High authority sites have all sort of links, both followed and nofollowed. Also other methods gets you more exposure for your business and build traffic and in case some cases you can get bait for links. For example a press release for a client of mine last couple of weeks got attention or a writer in the industry magazine and they wrote about my client and linked to it which was great IMO. @saba thank you. Yes I recommend staying to white hat as much as possible. It is just that some industries, it is harder to get natural links because people don't like to link to you. For example "payday loans" is one of those industries." Anyway thank you.
  14. Dev says:
    Hey Sefati, Great article and these are awesome tips to build backlinks. I think guest posting is the best way to build links. Social blogging communities like Blokube, MMO Social Network are another great way to build quality links. Thanks for sharing this great article.
  15. saba says:
    I loved this article, I have a established brick and mortar business but my website is very new and was built after clients literally begged me to have one. I like your list of white hat tactics, things I can do without jeopardizing the good reputation I have already. thank you Cheers Saba

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