Link building - am I too cautious?

[SamCUK]

The only backlink building I am doing is guest blogging as it seems most other methods have potential to harm rankings in the post panda/penguin era. As mentioned in another post I'm trying to get a strategy for social media that works as I believe social likes/shares are important. What other link building methods can I use that are totally safe? Is it okay to 'buy' a link on botw r examleas theyre editorally reviewed? I'm asking myself 2 questions when acquiring limks. 1. Would I want this link if google didn't exist and 2. Will it bring me relevant traffic. I'm almost scared of link building in case google punishes me. Are there any legitimate methods I'm missing?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Sam,

To be frank, you do not need to do deliberate link building activities to be able to rank in SERPs. However, the above statement greatly depends on the quality of the content that a page has and other on-page SEO factors. Pages with great content acquire links in a natural way as good content will be syndicated by active bloggers and webmasters all over the Internet.

So to answer your question, you can try to earn links by giving out (posting) quality content in the form of articles.. You can post these articles to the top article directories. Stick to top 5 and you should be good. Please be careful not to submit the same article to multiple article directories. This is how to can squeeze the most out of your article marketing effort.

You can also submit unique articles to top document sharing sites. Another method to expedite the process of acquiring links by contributing some quality work is, to join forums that operate in your niche and actively participate in them by doing some legit postings. Though most of the forums incorporate nofollow on the external links, this should not stop you in anyway from doing forum posting. Please never look at if a link is followed or not followed as long as you are adding some real value. Legit, highly relevant and informative content automatically becomes a links magnet.

There are other legit ways of acquiring legit links but the above should keep you busy enough. Hope these help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[SamCUK]

Hi, Thanks for your reply. I notice seo moz have a list of article directories with high domain authorities. Is it a good idea to submit to a few of these? Can they be trusted as quality links? I'm guessing they're not editorialy given links so possibly don't carry much weight?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Sam, you can definitely use the list on SEOMoz. However you can also have a look at the directories' PageRank, Alexa Rank (yes this helps sometimes), number of indexed pages related to your subject from the directory in Google and the list can go on..

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Sam

I would certainly look to keep it varied as well. Guest Posting is okay but you should keep an eye on the quality of these posts but if you put all of your links in one basket and then Google decides to depreciate or devalue those in some way well... you are playing a risky game.

Content and outreach is a good way but again we come to the quality issue, it has to be good, really good to be worthwhile and to get people to link to it.

Really, there is no limit to the way you can build links, but the metrics that matter are quality and relevance.

Maybe give these a look over:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible

[SamCUK]

Thanks for the links - very helpful!