The Weakest Link = YOU!!!

Just a few things to know about Link Building... Like it or not, link building has been and still is big, big business. Doing it well takes a lot of time and resources, which means that many webmasters/site owners can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Many agencies that handle other aspects of search engine marketing want to outsource it simply because of the massive resource drain. That’s great news for people like me who specialize in link building but the intense supply and demand nature of links coupled with the ease of promoting yourself through social media have led to a frightening increase in people who build bad links and really have no idea what they’re doing. As link building is considered an offpage tactic, to actually sell yourself as a link builder, you don’t have to do very much. People are desperate for help. However, it’s better to build no links than it is to embark upon a link building campaign that is full of nothing but spam that you will pay for twice: once when you put it up there, once when you have to remove it. If you’re shopping for link builders, make sure that the one you go with knows most of the following. 1.  Why Links Matter There’s no way to describe that quickly here but if you don’t know why links are important, you shouldn’t be building them alone. Links are how users and search engine spiders (Google bot) move around the internet and they give clues to what the linked-to content is about. 2.  HTML Code For Text & Image Links For a good reference you can visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp but generally, it’s pretty easy stuff: 3.  How To Read A Robots.txt File These can be tricky and you’ll se a lot of robots files that are coded incorrectly, so if you’re unsure of how to read one, there are a few good validators that are online. (I usually gravitate towards http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.) Robots files are always named robots.txt and are always found at the root, which means you can always access them at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If one doesn’t exist, well, you just won’t see one. That’s not a problem, but if one is there, make sure it’s valid. Here’s the code you want to really watch out for: User-agent: * Disallow: / That tells the search engines to go away when they show up. People commonly use this when they don’t have a development/test environment so that they can code live but not have the site get indexed. That’s ok if it’s how you want to work, but remember to remove that exclusion when you do want the engines to index you. If your site has recently disappeared, check the robots.txt immediately. You can also block engines using the method listed below. 4.  How To Check For Robots Blocking Outside Of The Robots.txt File There are some intricacies involved with using this method so it’s a good idea to read what Google has to say about blocking robots here. If your site has just disappeared and you have checked the robots.txt file and it’s all fine and dandy, check to see if this line is in your code: 5.  How To Use WordPress As one of the most common blogging platforms, you should familiarize yourself with it. It’s quite user-friendly in my opinion but there are tons of tutorials out there. However, like with many things, it’s something you can learn best by actually setting up a site and using it. If you don’t want to use WordPress, that’s fine – just learn how to set up a basic site on a popular platform. Here’s why I think this is so important for link building: once you are intimately involved in the innards of a site, you do start to think more critically about SEO, content creation, and usability. Those are all aspects of marketing that aren’t always involved with link building, but they should be. 6.  How To Do A Link Audit Don’t wait to audit your links until you get a warning letter from Google. Check and see what’s there right now. There are some great free tools that will give you a list of your back links so use them. You won’t always get all the functionality that you need from free tools and free versions of tools so if you’re doing a decent amount of link building, you should probably invest in at least one major paid link tool. Grab your data and start to analyze it whether you can export it or you have to copy and paste it. You need to know how to look at your profile as a whole, break it down into different parts (like percentages of sitewides, money keywords, etc.) and actually look at the sites in the report and evaluate whether or not that link is a good one.