Penguin used to be a harmless animal in the North Pole but is a dreaded word for many digital marketers today.
Even those who are doing nothing wrong with their link building shiver in their boots whenever a new update is announced.
Penguin targets low quality links to sites and penalizes them for it.
Penguin friendly link building tips
Sometimes webmasters venture a bit too far into territories they shouldn’t be going into and as a result get the rough end of the stick.
But don’t worry there are things that still work and you can build links relatively safely and rank your site.
Guest blogging the right way
Guest blogging shouldn’t be done for links. You can build a relatively small number of guest posts for links, but the vast majority should be there for adding value to the host blog.
What do I mean by it?
Low quality guest posts that are poorly written, having outsourced the task to someone in the Philippines isn’t just the right way to go about it.
When it comes to content marketing make sure that you put a great deal of effort into writing the content.
The content should provide value.
Also, according to Matt Cutts,
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2015, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done. it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a link building strategy.”
Start making Infographics
Infographics are a great to build links in a natural way. Infographics may not be as popular as they were used to be when the trend started.
However you can certainly gain a good number of links if Infographics are promoted well.
If you go to BuzzSumo and enter any website’s address you can see the most popular posts that the site has. It gets displayed there just below the place where you enter the site address.
If I type in Hubspot.com, I can see that the most popular post on Hubspot is an Infographic.
With too many people jumping on it, infographics have certainly waned in popularity but they still are useful link baits when done right.
Doing it right may require you to have a good marketing budget for the design and images.
You need a dedicated team to collect all the facts that pertain to the Infographic that you are making and so on.
Be active on social media
It’s not a joke when seasoned SEO experts say that Google has started taking into account social media signals.
There are ways to mimic social media engagement by buying likes and tweets from Fiverr. However fake engagement metrics don’t beat the real thing.
Eventually Google would catch up to that as well.
You need to post the links to your articles on several social media sites. Even on the same social media site like Facebook there will be a bunch of pages and groups all revolving around similar topics.
So you can use one social media website to post the article several times.
What’s even better is to build real engagement by replying to the people who stop by for comments.
Real engagement can drive traffic to your sites and help it rank really well.
Do outreach for links
Reaching out to relevant people in your industry for links isn’t a shameless act.
If you have written a great post there’s no reason to be ashamed of reaching out for links.
You can simply ask people to share your article to who have shared articles similar to what you have written.
It’s but natural for them to be interested in the kind of posts that you are doing.
But to have a higher success rate spend time connecting with people first. Blogging and link building are all about relationship building.
If you have good relationships with fellow bloggers, they won’t back out when you reach out to them.
To build relationships start by engaging with them on their blog via comments and on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Link to their articles as well if that makes sense and you are on the path to link earning.
Do video marketing
Video marketing platforms like YouTube allow you to link back to your site from the description box.
By placing your link there not only do you stand to get a great link but you also stand to attract tons of traffic from people who have watched the video.
For this to work the videos should be really good and helpful.
If you are shy of camera, just turn on the mic and speak on to it while presenting a power point presentation.
It has to add value and that’s the only thing that matters.
Conclusion
As you saw in the post above I tried to cover a lot of things that can be done today to build links the right way.
If you follow these techniques there’s a good chance that you will escape the wrath of Penguin updates.
More than building links your focus should be on earning links with great content.
This Article Is Contributed by Amanda Grace. She is a professional blogger who shares small business advice on her blog.
What to expect as the Penguin 3.0 algorithm settles covers the update that reshaped link building.
