One of the best ways to figure out which link building methods work is to experiment for yourself. Many people will tell you that one particular method works well or doesn’t work at all, but it’s important to figure this out for yourself as a lot of what is written about SEO is opinion rather than fact.
The best way to conduct an experiment is to create a completely clean page or site that doesn’t have any existing inbound links. You can create a page for free by using a service like Hubpages or Squidoo, but to maintain complete control over your content it is a good idea to go down the self-hosted route.
The experiment would ideally target a keyword which has some competition but which would be easy to rank well for with a small amount of effort. You really want to be able to target a top 10 spot in the search engines, so anything too competitive will be a waste of time. Before conducting the experiment, do some keyword research to find the best keywords to target.
For me, the most crucial part of the experiment is to target one particular link building technique at a time. Where people tend to go wrong is that they use several different link building techniques at once and it can be difficult to determine which technique is effective and which one is a dud.
Techniques I use for link building experiments include blog commenting, article submission and blog reviews. These are typically low level forms of link building which means that the value of each link can be quite low but once you start to build a volume of such links you should start to get an idea about whether they are working or not.
Experiments like this can take some time so I would expect to conduct the experiment over a period of at least 3-6 months before I expect to see the results, although sometimes if the method is successful you can usually see results a lot quicker than this. I have just started my first experiment using this domain and will revisit this post to provide an update on how the experiment went at a later date.
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