Link Diversity: What’s It Mean?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Do you have diversity in your link portfolio? Do you even know what that means? Let’s define it.

Link diversity is one of the most important principles to keep in your search engine optimization arsenal. What it means is, instead of focusing on high PageRank, relevant websites within your niche and building links from those sites, you branch out and seek links from a variety of sources. A good, diverse link portfolio should include links from as many different types of sources available. Here are some suggestions:

High authority sites within your niche

Low authority sites within your niche

High authority sites outside of your niche

Low authority sites outside of your niche

Social bookmarking sites

Website directories

Blog directories

Blog comments and trackbacks

Forums

Wikis

Variation in link anchor text

Links from multiple TLDs

Forum directories

Anywhere you can think of

Getting a more diverse link portfolio isn’t hard. It is tedious work. It requires a thoughtful plan that you can implement in just one hour a day over the course of a month or two.

Some specific strategies you can employ to create a more diverse link portfolio include:

Add a blog to your website

Participate in several forums, both within your niche and outside of your niche

Trackback to other blogs from your own

Submit articles to article directories

Send out press releases

Visit other blogs and comment on them (do NOT spam!)

Submit your site to website directories

Submit your blog to blog directories

Submit your forum to forum directories

Develop a social network and vote on each others’ stories at all the popular social bookmarking sites

Create wiki entries within and outside of your niche

When it comes to building links. One strategy will not do. You have to be creative and active in as many places as possible. In many cases, all you have to do become a social media butterfly. Develop solid relationships with others and some of this will take care of itself. Then you can go behind the natural progression and fill in the holes. In a little time, you can build a solid link portfolio with link diversity as your No. 1 goal.

Category: Link Building

Read similar posts in Link Building

7 Comments

Made Wednesday, 7 of January , 2009 at 2:10 pm

Excellent post with the two great lists. The one thing missing is the “why”…which I assume you agree is because the search engines look for natural linking patters, and if all your links are from forum posts, or if they all come from directory listings or if they all come from blogrolls, that looks very staged - not at all like real votes by real webmasters who think your website is so good that it’s worth giving it a high ranking.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Wednesday, 7 of January , 2009 at 3:55 pm

Yes, David, you are correct. You want your linking to look natural, as you say. Thanks for your input.

Comment by Singapore SEO Expert

Made Thursday, 8 of January , 2009 at 12:05 am

Other than the high authority sites, which link category you suggested is the hardest to get?

Comment by david

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 12:41 pm

I agree strongly on these tips, the blog is one great point, it can also drive relevant traffic outside your organic search results…

the other point is that some other search engines ignore the nofollow tags, so you can get some benefit but if you spam, you will just get the comment deleted and search engines will lose trust in your site because links arent staying around for long…

Comment by david

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 12:43 pm

@Sinagpore Expert, it would have to be .mil or whitehouse.gov

Comment by Megan

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 4:08 pm

Your article justifies what I always thought about being resourceful and creative when it comes to link building. Good input there Nick

Comment by Roy

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 4:39 pm

That’s is so much good information to know thanks Brick Marketing.I will use this to bring my website ranking up and get better traffic results for my website.