How to Earn Natural Links with SEO?

First, what are natural links and why have they become so important?

Search engines want to give the users the best possible experience and the most relevant results. In the early SEO days, link building (number of links to your website) was critical to achieving high search rankings. In the future, link building will be just as important, but the way the links are being valued by search engines has evolved.

The new metric for “link value” is based on certain qualitative measures that are becoming more and more critical to long term online business success.

Link Value = [Relevancy + Credibility + Participation + Diversity + Popularity]

Is the site linking to your website?

Relevant – Getting a link from a football ecommerce site for a Pets site is not relevant? Getting a link from the website of a Vet doctor is!

Credible – Getting a link back from a new domain, or a website which offers little or no value, or a website/webpage that just has outbound links or from link farms is of NO value, even if they have decent page rank. Getting links from industry related sites, blogs, local associations or in the communities you participate in (article sites, social sites etc) is considered credible.

Valuing you – Good websites reward users who participate in their community. The more you participate, the better reputation you have and better the link juice passed. Participating in select 10 to 15 article submission sites, and 10 to 15 social bookmarking/ social media sites, and 2 relevant blogs/forums is good. More is not always better.

Diverse – Getting 1000 web directory links is NOT as good as getting diverse 200 links from relevant web directories, article sites, social sites, video submissions sites, blogs, industry related sites, forums, PR sites etc.

Popular – Getting a link from a website that is popular with good traffic is better. This is just common sense. A relevant and popular site = targeted traffic for your site. I am not sure if there is any “link value” worth mention here.

So the number of credible links from relevant and diverse web, user and social communities is one of the important parameters search engines are evaluating while ranking a website/ webpage.

For a moment let’s get back to the title of this blog post “How to Earn Natural Links?”

The operative word in the title is “Earn”. In the new link playground of the future you will have to ‘Earn” the links, and not buy, exchange, barter or trade for them.

While buying, exchanging, bartering for links worked in the past, and your website is not getting penalized for it, sooner or later these links will become obsolete like the dinosaurs. The top search rankings will eventually be dominated by websites that are getting linked-too based on the merit of their content or value they provide.

To earn links you have to create “reference worthy links” by creating content of value that the users will find informative, unique and resourceful. Creating 2 to 3 new blog posts a week, and syndicating and promoting that content across relevant social, web and user communities is a good SEO strategy to build natural links based on merit.

The biggest bonus with creating great content (and making that content visible) is that webmasters around the world like linking to relevant and informative content as it benefits their users. (Nevil Darukhanawala)