We’ve already discussed the importance of building external links to your internet business‘s web site, and we can’t emphasise that enough when it comes to improving your search engine optimisation (SEO) results.

Having discussed some basic steps to take to get started with the new process known as link development, it’s time to look at some more advanced strategies to move your link building efforts into high gear.

Just to recap the reason for this new approach. The search engines, and Google in particular, are now looking for more natural, organic links that are of high quality rather than just any links to any sites. It’s now about deep link building rather than just link building, so let’s look at more advanced ways of doing so.

Powerful Techniques For Developing Links

The tactics discussed here may take more effort, but are the best way to develop high value links that will reward the effort extended now and for a long time in the future.

1. Build A Widget

This technique is extremely powerful as building a widget is fairly simple, but getting that widget adopted on a large scale is the tricky part. Your widget must offer a strong value proposition such that thousands of web site owners decide to add your widget to their web sites, but this is complicated by the fact that you’re competing for advertising space and web site real estate with such powerful players as Google Adsense.

2. Information Graphics, Or Infographics

An infographic is a visual representation of data or knowledge or information that is used to explain a complex issue in more simple visual terms. In other words, it needs to be useful as well as informative and/or entertaining in such a way that it has the potential to go viral and be widely adopted by your peers.

Tracking Your Link Development Efforts

Once you embark on your link development campaign, it’s important to keep track of how your efforts are going so you can see what’s working and what’s not and double your efforts in the areas that are working and abandon, or, at least, reduce those that aren’t.

Let’s look at some ways to track your efforts:

1. Google Webmaster

The tools offered within Google Webmaster have grown and improved in proportion with Google itself. Practically all SEO efforts can be tracked, including internal and external links, click-through data, visits and keyword ranking. Some of the most important features include:

  • Site performance evaluation
  • Monitoring external links
  • Sitemap submission
  • Tracking crawl errors
  • Monitoring internal links
  • Tracking duplicate Title and Meta Tags
  • Traffic and revenue projections based on search query analysis

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2. Open Site Explorer

This tool provides information on how your link portfolio is shaping up (your link graph), your site’s trust ranking and your anchor text distribution.

a) Anchor Text Distribution

This can provide you with a benchmark of how your site compares to other sites when it comes to keyword-specific anchor text links pointing back to your site as compared to your competitors.

b) Link Graph

The tool will show you updates to your external followed links, which you can then use to plot your own link graph, showing you graphically how your external link efforts are working.

It should be obvious by now that link building has changed and will no doubt continue to change as search engines look to optimize their users’ experience. But, one thing that hasn’t changed (and shows no sign of doing so) is the importance of high-quality external links to your internet business, so take the above link development steps and watch your rankings start to improve.

Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for all the help you need to formulate and execute a successful link development campaign.

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