Ethical SEO

Ethical SEO practices

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Link Building is the most time consuming side of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. There are many link building strategies that companies should pursue, however, knowing which strategies to target can be challenging. Not all link building strategies are ethical, and in fact, certain methods can hurt your ranking overall.


To start off let's talk about ethical strategies that are proven to work:

Create Testimonials: Creating testimonials on other sites is a good way to get incoming links back to your site. In general, this will alleviate the need to reciprocate links back to their site, thus creating a one-way incoming link from the testimonial. It is my firm belief that one-way incoming links are ranked higher than reciprocal links (linking to their site and they link back to your site).

Posting to Discussion Forums and Blogs: Works the same as when creating testimonials. Most forums allow you to place a link along with your name.

Publishing Free-to-Copy Articles: Allowing users to freely copy your article in exchange that they leave the link back to your site in the article is another wonderful tactic.

Posting to Directories: Posting your site to DMOZ and Yahoo Directory (299$ yearly) in your target industry is crucial. Doing this will greatly increase your link popularity, which is another key factor in search engine optimization (SEO). For a list of other directory submission sites click here.

Reciprocal Links: Reciprocating links with other relevant sites can increase your ranking as well. Beware though that you should not call your reciprocal link page “links” or “link”. This is because search engine spiders are becoming wearier and will not index these pages. I generally title my reciprocal link pages “Submit a site” or “Submit URL”.

Purchasing Text Links: This is another new alternative to acquiring one way links back to your site.

Now let's talk about which link building strategies to avoid:

Link Farms: Link Farms are a network of sites that link to each other in mass quantities for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity. Placing your link in a link farm will lower your ranking substantially. Search Engines see them as spam.

FFA Listings: Free for all listings are not even indexed by search engines, and are thus a waste of time to link from. The only real purpose for these is for spammers to collect email addresses from.

Incoming Links from Irrelevant sites: The quality of the link is much more important than the quantity of links you receive. NEVER link your site from irrelevant web sites; this will only decrease your ranking in the search engines.

Be patient when building links, it takes time. Pursuing proper link building strategies in the beginning will save you one big headache in the end.

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