Predicting the Best Link Building Strategies for 2014

At this point in the SEO game, we can all agree that it’s not very smart to try to think ahead and predict anything. With that being said, these are the only link building strategies that are your safest option today, for the rest of 2013, and will probably be just as effective next year.
 

1.) Do-It-Yourself Link Building.

You can call it manual link building if you want. Same difference… just do it yourself. You have more control over where and how your links are published. Having full control allows you to maintain:

• Valuable introduction explaining the link. Maybe even encouraging readers to click on it for more info on a relevant topic?
• Informative anchor text. (Does not have to be one of your target keywords!)
• Don’t just link to your home page. Link to the pages that are most relevant to the source, usually a specific service/product page or a blog article that elaborates a point.
• Promote new blog posts on social media, if you can be classy about it.

2.) Blogs are for articles, not SEO.

If your entire blog was built for the search engines, just do yourself (and the rest of the internet) a favor and take it down. On the other hand, if your blog is full of valuable articles then you will get subscribers who can’t wait to read the next one. You will get returning traffic. Your articles will be shared by readers via social media, and you don’t even have to ask them to! High quality content is a wonderful thing. All it takes is focusing on topics and value above link building and keyword optimization. True story.

3.) Guest blog.

Try this on for size. You write a blog, as a guest on another blog, and you don’t try to sell anything. Instead, you share your expertise. You teach readers something. At the end, include an About the Author box with a link to your own blog (or Services page) for more information. This isn’t link building to bump up your Google Page Rank. That’s how you build links for instant, targeted, qualified, interested traffic ready to buy.

4.) Keep Tabs on Links

Now this isn’t something you want to spend countless hours on, because link audits can be very tedious. The information you receive when examining back links is useful if you need to clean up spammy, low quality back links that hurt you more than they help you. Luckily, you can always use this tool to perform an in depth link audit in the time it will take you to pour a cup of coffee.