Link building is an important part of your SEO strategy if you want your website to rank in the search engine results for one or one thousand keyword terms. Since Google holds 80% (yes, you read that right) of the search market in Canada we tend to focus our link building efforts on quality inbound links from authoritative web sites. Basically, we are doing what Google tells webmasters to do.
In the past, MSN was all about volume of links and they were never able to put a consistent strategy together in order to serve search engine results that could compete with Google. The results were simply spammy and inadequate.
With the launch of Bing, however, things have changed. The new search engine is very similar to Google and Microsoft is even communicating with webmasters more effectively in an effort weed out as much spam as they can.
Here are a few of link building tactics Bing suggests webmasters should avoid:
- The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
- Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
- Using hidden links in your pages
- Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web
- Linking out to known web spam sites
Here are a few strategies that should be part of your link building campaign courtesy of Bing.
- Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
- Publish expert articles to online article directories
- Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
- Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
Head on over to the Bing community blog for more tips on link building if you want to rank well on Bing.