Since Google rolled out its Penguin Update last 2012, many SEO people soon began to panic and realized the cold hard truth that excessive link building is not going to cut it anymore. The industry is forced to think beyond the box and thus it gave birth to what we call now as link earning.
Knowing the difference between link earning and the traditional link building for some who are still clinging to the old SEO mindset of the past might be harder to grasp. But we hope that this piece will give you a clearer idea of their differences.
To help you more understand their differences, here is an overview:
Link earning is an approach that uses the quality, usefulness and relevance of your contents to earn citations or credits back to your site.
Link building on the other hand, focuses more on the intent of finding websites that would allow you to create links back to your site, taking little or not regards to the relevance or value of the content.
Whether link earning strategy is a higher evolution of link building or not, it’s one of the most efficient ways to rank well in search engines, considering that Google want us to focus more on quality.
This article will show why link earning has essentially replaced traditional link building as a technique to achieve sustainable and long-term Google rankings.
Natural Cross Promotion and Partnership Between Sites
Early tactics of link building such as reciprocal links and link exchanges are now obsolete and ineffective. What link earning has to offer is cross promotion and partnership between sites to mutually endorsed each other’s quality content even without using keyword-rich anchor texts.
Whether it’s a fairly written story, a well-designed infographic, or a well-directed video presentation, valuable content is what most of the websites are looking for these days.
What you have to do is to contact those websites that will most likely post that kind of content you made, and show to them how much value it will add in their website. While on the process, you might also be interested to post some of their content in your website that you think your audience will also like. This kind of relationship ensures that links are happening in a very natural and non-manipulative way.
Social Sharing that Leads to Links
Most of the people today spends their time on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, statistics shows that there are over 2.23 billion social networks users worldwide.
The main link earning tactic is the publication of quality content in these platforms in hope that the message gets magnified by users and ultimately links back to you if they find it relevant and interesting.
Compared to link building tactics of mass submissions to social bookmarking and networking sites, this newest approach lets the audience to see for themselves the quality of your content and eventually share them to their networks and this will lead to organic links.
Earn Links Directly Because of Content
Genuine and helpful content are what people loves to share, wants to link to, would write about or include on their press or research piece. Though it will take a lot of effort to generate one, this is the new way to “buy” links through your content.
What Google wants us to do is to make our links as natural as possible, and in doing so, you have to make quality content speak for itself.
You don’t have to spend on this old link building practice of buying links just to get you content posted on someone’s website because aside from it’s a bad long-term strategy, it is also considered as a black hat tactic in SEO which may result in penalization.
Request Inclusion On Curated Directories
Known web directories that are maintained by some organization offers more credibility than link building’s technique of mass submissions to general, low-quality directories, which most of the time have duplicate contents and full of spammy links.
Being included in lists like Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in the US or the Better Business Bureau Directory in your area or Yelp’s list of “Thai Restaurants in Seattle” gives your business more trustworthiness factor.
So make every effort to “earn” your way into these lists.
Guest Post for More Exposure
You don’t want to submit your hard-worked content to article directories which most of the time are full of low quality articles and spammers.
Link earning has already evolved from that old link building technique of submitting to article directories and now offers a more a proactive approach that is guest blogging.
The underlying concept behind guest posting is that you will pitch your quality content to relevant sites which are very picky and cares a lot about what is being put on their sites.
Remember: You don’t want to submit guest post just to get links, you are doing it for exposure and visibility as well.
Community Members Will Link to You Organically
Traditional link building tactic of leaving links on guest books, forums, open comments and all other kinds of stuff all over the net does not work anymore. Google consider them as manipulative and deceptive link schemes.
The new and more efficient way of doing this is by joining online communities with real membership. Actively participating in their discussions won’t just expand your network, but can also improve your website’s SEO.
The trick here is to deliver them with content that you think might get their interest and is useful for the group, and when they find it interesting, there is a great chance that they’ll promote it even outside the group and they will link back to your main website.
Build A Social Network Of Influencers
Pre and post penguin periods, one of the easiest ways to boost your rankings is to build link popularity by creating a network of sites that will link to each other (PBN).
It was very effective back then because of the search engine’s dependence on link popularity to establish ranking order for search results.
Today, most people still claim PBN to be effective. But if you are a person who don’t want to be surprised of an imminent Google penalization, then don’t do this!
The new and more ethical approach is to build a social network of influencers. These influencers who own websites and have vast presence in Twitter, Google+ and Facebook can link to you and influence other people that will get people paying attention to you.
Due to their large number of followers, they can amplify your content distribution in various channels and enables you to harness the power of word of mouth marketing at a digital level which will ultimately leads to organic earned links.
Whether you are just starting out or a veteran in the SEO community, knowledge in differentiating the tactics used in this two approach of gaining links is important so we can tell if we are keeping up with newest search engine algorithm updates.
Source from CJG Digital Marketing
