SEO professionals and web masters have experienced a roller coaster ride with Google’s Penguin updates late in April 2012. What jolted them and their websites is the over optimisation or backlinking from poor, low quality websites known for adding numbers to web spam.
Most of these webmasters and SEO experts were even unaware of the fact that their websites have backlinks from low quality and spam oriented websites which caused their websites to lose a ground against Google’s Penguin update.
In case you are one of those poor guys who lost their way to Google after penguin updates just because poor or low link building, here are five useful tips for penguin proof link building that you can apply to your website’s link building and can stand strong against penguin’s updates in future. (we wish so!)
Focus on quality, not quantity
The first and most important condition for successful link building campaign for any website is to generate/gain backlinks from high quality websites. No website can rank well if it does not have back links from high quality websites. Most of SEO beginners always discount this fact and start building jungles of low quality backlinks and believe that if they do link building and get thousands of links, they will see their site in top ranks. Well, this is nothing but just a day-dreaming!
Always focus on quality rather than quantity.
Hundreds or thousands of backlinks won’t get your website on top, but high quality, trustworthy links will only help you. And given Google’s penguin update, it is clear that Google loves quality more than quantity. So stop playing the number game, and start building links from high quality websites.
Be social, be successful
The year 2012 has really been of social media. And businesses are highly exploring this social media for their online marketing campaigns. From multinational brands to local businesses, everyone is on social media world and why not, social media channels like facebook, twitter and linkedin are more important than ever. So make sure your website is also social and gives visitors ability to share the content with the world. Use social sharing tools and plugins that enables users to share content on social media sites like facebook. Use ShareThis, AddThis, TweetDeck etc.
Don’t overlink your home page, give inner-pages a chance
It is commonly seen that most of sites which are effected by penguin updates overlinked their home pages in link building campaign. Most beginners build backlinks for home page and neglects linking their websites’ inner pages. Google’s penguin updates has warned such sites and has given clear message that it will punish sites that has overvalued home pages.
Use alt and title tags wisely
Websites are built for human visitors so don’t just put content that distract your visitors from website. We have seen many websites having loads of content that doesn’t make any sense! When it comes to use title and alt tags, many beginners load all keywords in each image and in each title. So be clever and be mindful.
Guest blogging
The year’s latest trend in high quality link building is Guest blogging. So take your pen with you and start writing for other sites and contribute as guest blogger in high quality, trustworthy websites/blogs that offer guest blogging. This is one of the best ways to create highly reputable backlinks for your websites. SEO experts advise you to go for fewer number of blogs with high PR and high quality rather than large number of blogs with no substance or no quality.
