Search Engine Optimization

If you’re trying to improve your website’s search engine ranking, you’ve undoubtedly spent a significant amount of time building backlinks to your website. Although having high quality backlinks is crucial to ranking well in the search engines, diversifying your link portfolio is also important. Think about it this way: a site with 20 links from 20 different websites will rank better on the search engines than a site with 40 links from 2 websites.

Also, if the search engines discover that most of the backlinks to your website are coming from the same site(s), they may penalize your site. Sites that have a high quantity of links from the same sources appear over-optimized, as if they’re trying to manipulate search engine rankings.

To make your link building portfolio look as natural as possible, try to get links from a variety of websites. Research shows that search engines prefer sites that have a diverse link portfolio. Furthermore, not only will getting links from a myriad of sources improve your site’s search engine rankings, it will also help you attract more traffic, boost your site’s authority, and expose your website to a wider audience.

However, diversifying your link building portfolio doesn’t stop at acquiring links from a variety of domains; there are many other factors that come into play. Here are some tips that will help you diversify your link building portfolio:

• Get links from both high authority and low authority sites in your niche.
• Get links from high authority and low authority sites outside of your niche that are still relevant to your industry.
• Get links from social bookmarking sites.
• Get links from web 2.0 sites.
• Get links from directories.
• Don’t just link to the home page. Link to deep pages within your site.
• Get active on various social networks, so different people link to your content.
• Add backlinks to your forum signatures.
• Ask your peers to link to your site/blog in their blog rolls.
• Get links not only from different domains, but also from different IP addresses.
• Build links with varied anchor text.

Most importantly, keep in mind that link building is a steady process. Search bots will be suspicious if you get tons of new links overnight, and your site’s rankings could suffer as a result. For optimal results, take it slow. Like anything else worth doing, diversifying your link portfolio takes time, patience, and perseverance. Rome wasn’t built a day, and you can’t build a natural, diverse link portfolio that quickly, either! Check your website reports on a regular basis to see where you can improve your site’s link diversity.

It’s also important to keep in mind that acquiring and managing a diversity of links from various sources can be time-consuming and difficult. To streamline the process, keep a detailed log of link sources, targets, and anchor text. Doing so will enable you to keep everything organized and prevent redundancy.