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PRESS RELEASE - Exeter, UK, 28 November 2007

Natural Link Building

How to negate the impact of Google’s crack down on paid for links.

Google guidelines clearly discourage link buying and link selling; however Google’s recent penalisation against sites for selling links has come as a surprise for many SEO experts especially as the sites in question offered insightful, relevant and regularly updated content and were not spammy in any way.

Andy Beard at his self titled SEO and marketing blog reported the following sites had been penalised (October 24, 2007):

• Autoblog PR6 to PR4
• Engadget PR7 to PR5
• Pro Blogger PR6 to PR4
• Search Engine Guide PR7 to PR4
• The Washington Post PR7 to PR5
• Forbes PR7 to PR5

Evidently Google is becoming stricter with their policies, therefore getting creative with your link building strategy is a must. Old school black hat techniques should be binned and new multi-pronged approaches should be considered.

A few tips for seeking out linking opportunities

Implement digital PR

Digital PR is the perfect vehicle for gaining back links to your website. By writing news releases and distributing them to online sources you are offering relevant content with the potential to gain both coverage and a link back to your site. Creating positive brand noise - and the associated link back to you site - is a natural means of generating links against a suite of relevant keywords and phrases.

Implement viral online marketing campaigns

Developing a new and exciting application or campaign that can be shared with an online audience will allow you to generate attention and links back to your site. Integrating the campaign with a social network will increase awareness but be sure to optimise linking content for search.

Implement a stakeholder engagement exercise

By simply picking up the phone to talk to partner organisations, related companies or relevant online resources you may yield good SEO results. Sometimes the most straightforward requests into relevant and authoritative sites offer the best link building potential.

Important things to remember

• Build links at a natural rate based o your brand’s current acquisition patterns.
• Keep quality at the forefront of your mind. Avoid linking with irrelevant sites.
• Establish links from well respected and established sites, longevity is a key criteria for link value
• Build links to a range of pages on your site, not just one.

Netrank can provide you with a range of SEO services.

To speak to Lucy Allen (Netrank MD) about link cultivation or any other issue relating to SEO, online marketing or Web 2.0/ social networking, please contact:

Eleanor Precious on 07875 091 487