With all the changes happening to Google search these days, it is hard to understand what small business link opportunities exist. That is exactly why we need to discuss in-depth which link opportunities are good, and which are bad.
Good Small Business Link Opportunities
Quality Guest Blogging
The days of $5 articles are over. Google no longer values links to your site in articles that are not informative for readers, and worse so grammatically incorrect and written in broken English that no one understands.
While Google has put the hammer down on guest blogging over the past year, they have not hit all bloggers equally. Google understands that not all guest posts are bad. Instead, they are hitting the spammy guest bloggers with the unnatural anchor text in the author profile at the bottom.
Instead of relying upon anchor texts and crummy posts, spend more time on quality articles where the linking naturally fits in with the content. That way you will not lose ground with Google, and will have a quality article that you can share across your social networks proudly.
Social Media Links
This leads us to another form of linking: social media links. While this is not very highly rated in the algorithm right now, social media does factor into your search rankings. The fact that social links are there is a testament to how far Google has come over the past two years in respect to their attitude towards social media.
Infographics
MOZ.com recently discussed how the spammy infographics are no longer going to work for SEO link builders, because Google does not like the fact that the same infographic with the same anchor text is being used on 100’s of sites across the internet.
Instead, use WordPress Plugins like the one that John See created to help you vary the anchor text, so whenever you launch an infographic the anchor text changes with each image embed. This provides hundreds, and potentially thousands of anchor texts to be shown across the web providing you with a larger expanse of link coverage.
Putting Your Small Business Link Strategy Together
As you can see, there are a few different ways to create stellar backlinks for your site. The key is to find what works best for your audience and then use those findings to put together the best small business link opportunities for your business.