What is natural link building?

Is there really a natural method or commonality to the way billions of people interact and link between trillions of URLs?

Sure, there are probably a lot of common trends and patterns that may set off warning signs or otherwise, but since we don’t know them there is only one sensible solution:

Diversify!

Even Wil Reynolds, a search industry giant, has claimed a client of his received too many quality links!  What we can ascertain from this is that no single type of link or methodology holds the key to rankings.  Once again, diversity is key.

So how do we diversify our link building?  Let me count thy ways…

1. Anchor Text
2. Link Type
3. IP Diversity
4. Temporal Patterns
5. Deep Links
6. Dofollow VS Nofollow

Varying Anchor Text:

When choosing anchor text for link building, you basically have two options:

1. Exact match

2. Partial match

Exact match contains all of your keywords and may have additional words in the anchor text.  Partial match includes some, but not ALL of the terms in your keyword phrase.

Exact match link building is quickly becoming an outdated practice.  Exact match should be used sparingly in order to appear more natural.  This leaves a question: what is a natural amount of exact match links to build?  All you have to do is analyze your competitor’s backlinks.  Take the total amount of links they have and then measure the percentage that are exact match links.  This is your target: adhere to it closely.

For the rest of your link building you can use many different variants of partial match anchor text.  Here are some effective ways to generate great ideas for your anchor text

1. Synonyms

Replacing the terms in your keyword phrase with synonyms is a good way to create strong anchor text.

Ex. link building strategies -> backlinking techniques.

This provides you with many different options as you can swap out any number of terms from your keyword with any different synonyms.  Also, don’t just rely on your own guesses and assumptions for finding synonyms.  If you search in Google with a tile(~) directly in front of your keyword you will find the synonyms that Google uses.  Any bolded term in the results are synonyms that you could use with your link building.

2. Suggest Terms

Google suggest is great place to find closely related searches.  Rather than gathering them manually or building a scraper, just head to over ubersuggest.  Ubersuggest is a very quick online Google suggest scraper.  It will provide you with the top 10 overall suggest terms as well as the top 10 for each additional letter added to your keyword.

For instance, you will get the top 10 suggest terms for search for your “your keyword a” and “your keyword b” where the following terms will begin the added letter.

3. Related Searches

You won’t always see Related Searches for your keyword, but many times you will.  All you have to do is search for your keyword and scroll to the bottom of the SERPs.  Here you will see a list of a few additional search queries that Google suggests.  This is a great source for anchor text because these are searches that Google thinks the user would want to use.  In other words, Google is telling us that they are  very similar.

4. Contextual Targeting Tool

This might be my favorite source for some quick ideas.  Inside of Google’s Adword keyword tool, there is a link to their contextual targeting tool.

By submitting your keyword here you will be provided with groups of similar terms.  Due to the nature of the tool, the most relevant and usable keywords are usually along the top and left-hand sides.

Varying link type:

Links can vary in many ways including their placement on page.  You can get links that are in-content, after the content, in the sidebar, or footer, for instance.

Varying your link building methods will help you greatly diversify your link profile.  Here are 22 common methods for link building:

1. Guest Blogging
2. Blog Commenting
3. Article Marketing
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Press Releases
6. Blog Networks
7. Free blogs
8. Forums
9. Directory Submission
10. Expired Domain Redirecting
11. Broken Link building
12. Video Marketing
13. RSS Submission
14. Profile Links
15. Widgets & Badges
16. Q & A Sites
17. Link Baiting
18. CSS Galleries
19. Blog Carnivals
20. Document Directories
21. Software Directories
22. Podcast Directories

Now there’s no excuses – there are many ways to build your links!

Varying IP Diversifying:

By varying your backlinking methodology, you will naturally receive links from many different sites, but it is important to place an emphasis on the IP diversity of your links.

Receiving backlinks from the same URLs will begin to show the wear and tear of diminishing returns.  If you are blog commenting for instance, don’t just comment on the same 5-10 sites.  Comment on a new site every time if you can in order to achieve the greatest level of diversity.

Varying Temporal Link building patterns

Consistent link building is good, but you need to switch things up.  Not every page on your site should have the same pattern for link acquisition.  For instance, if you always build links to new content right away and then stop then that will become redundant.

Find some old pages you haven’t linked to in a while and give it some fresh links or hold off your link building to new content.  Anything to switch things up.

Varying Deep Link Ratio

You might find yourself always linking to the same page(s).  While it is common for your homepage to receive the bulk of your backlinks, make sure you build links to other pages as well.

PageRank flows through your whole site, so don’t feel like you are only building links to one page.  The truth is that when you build links to any page on your site, you are still building links to your whole site in a sense.  By backlinking to many of the pages on your site you may find your homepage ranking higher for it’s keyword without additional direct links.

Varying Dofollow VS Nofollow

Your sites link profile should have a healthy mixture of both dofollow and nofollow links.  Having an extraordinarily high percentage of dofollow links could make your site look unnatural to the search engines.  Establish some methods of nofollow link building that you can turn to if you are getting too many dofollow.

A few methods for this include video submission, document submission, and Q&A sites.

Conclusion

The big picture here is diversity.  There’s no single way to attain your first page rankings.  Switch up how, when, and where you build links.  Try new methods and link to old pages.  Vary the anchor text you use like crazy and copy the winning percentage of exact match for your keyword.

This is how you build powerful, algorithm proof rankings.