The future of Link-building

I’ve got this song by ‘4 Non Blondes’ stuck in my head, it’s called “What’s Up”, see the extract and the video below:

And I say hey…. hey….
I said hey, what’s goin’ on
And I say hey…. hey….
I said hey, what’s goin’ on
Ooh, Ooh, Oooohh, Oooohh, what’s up…
Ooh, Ooh, Oooohh, Oooohh, what’s up…

Spending most of the day analysing website performance, I often ask myself: what’s goin’ on??

Head of Webspam at Google, Mr Matt Cutts is running circles around SEO people everywhere, rendering the old school off-page SEO techniques useless, if not dangerous.  Here at Tug we are big supporters of industry expert Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, who has sounded the alarm on how the search landscape has changed.

I have observed that in the past certain keywords were able to be targeted clearly in order to improve related positions, but nowadays the same technique would actually create lower positions. Loads of guys in this industry have had success in driving lots of traffic to their sites thanks to a bunch of anchor text backlinks, but that was before the advent of Cutt’s latest brainchild, Penguin.

Listed below are some recommendations for things  you could be doing in order to appear in Google listings in the coming months:

• despite the fact that you need to get  keywords in the first position, you may not want to heavily build these type of anchor text links that previously were your best friend :). You may prefer to start building up a list of variations of your targeted keywords and build links with different anchor texts. You can also place your keywords near the brand link, and this will improve positions too.
• Guest blogging: it has been two years since SEOs went crazy on guest blogging activities. Some people relied on My Blog Guest and Blogger Link Up as guest posting services, others tried to pitch their stories, ‘how to’ guides and ‘top 10 tips’ to high authority journals. The second type were the ones that succeeded in building better links.  Moreover, you should avoid blogs with too many guest blog post as a general rule.
• Variety: it’s best to avoid relying on a the same link-building techniques time and time again, otherwise your link profiles will end up looking unnatural.
• Create content: business should start to give away free resources in order to get link backs from important websites. For example, if businesses provide a free teaching resource on road safety and publish this on their website, they can get at least 10 good websites to link to them. I come across loads of this stuff when I’m looking at website backlink profiles and these people are usually in top positions.