“Linking is a key SEO technique, as every link to your site is a vote in your favor, telling search engines that your site has good content, and is good enough to be visited”.

Once the process of creating a website and posting some content has been sorted, the next thing a webmaster thinks about is how to get visitors to their site, in internet marketing terms “drive traffic to their site”. Driving traffic to a site is the step that leads headlong into monetizing a website, and with that in mind, I want to share smart SEO strategies that works every time for me.

If you don’t already know what SEO is, or aren’t sure about what exactly it is about, you can read up on what is SEO?

There are a number of SEO techniques that webmasters use, some webmasters employ individuals and companies to handle their website SEO. Webmasters need to be careful the type of SEO they use in trying to improve their site rank, because there are certain methods used that Google is against, and when those methods are employed, the website can be penalized.

SEO is divided into On-site SEO and Off-site SEO. Under off-site SEO, I want to discuss linking, because you will be finding out soon how important linking is, and how to use it smartly. I will be classifying a few other off-site SEO strategies under linking for better understanding.

Linking
The reason I have classified some other SEO strategies that work under linking is because, in the end, the goal is to direct as many people to your website as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to include links to your website in as many platforms as you possibly can.


Links are the ways by which visitors are directed to your website, it’s a very easy one click process. Linking is one great way to drive lots of traffic to your site. Imagine you saw a joke and you wanted to share it with family and friends, let’s say you saw plenty jokes where you found the first one, most people wouldn’t want to begin to copy and paste the jokes to friends and family, they most probably will go “hey check out this site where I found this outrageously funny jokes on jokes.com. Or someone found an answer to a question they’re having a debate about or something, linking is the way they direct people to the place they found their answers.

One important thing you should note and always bear in mind is that your links should look as natural as natural can look. To make your links look as natural as possible, you need to do these 2 things.

Link Diversity:
This means that your incoming links are from different sources. It will be okay if you have 5-10 links from a forum, that looks natural enough, but if about 1,000 links which is all the links your site has, are all coming from a forum, that looks totally unnatural, and that is one of the bad SEO strategies. Also not all incoming links you create should be directed at your homepage, some should be directed to different content on your website.

Anchor Text:
This is the text used to wrap a link. For example, it is good that webmasters are aware of how to manage a website. How to manage a website is the anchor text, the real hyperlink leading to the content is wrapped in that text. Link to your website with several anchor texts, that way, your links look natural.

There are different types of links, or should I say different ways to create links, and all of them are very important. I’ll start with-