Link-building has become a much-maligned element in the world of SEO, but it needn’t be like that. One of the problems it has suffered in the last couple of years has been a lack of creativity. It was inevitable that Google would take a negative stance towards SEO (as it did with it’s Penguin and Panda updates) at some point and the fact that many SEO practitioners had got lazy meant that it was very easy for Google to spot all that black hat SEO.

However, with a little diversity and a little extra care you can build a successful SEO campaign. I’m currently working on an SEO campaign for Perpetual Solutions, a network, IT and technology training company. They want to achieve really well in Google searches for “network training”, a hugely popular search term. To get there though we’re going to focus on a number of less popular searches first, using a diverse range of keywords as well as different landing pages. It’s this kind of diversity that Google is fine with, it’s when you always use the same keywords and the home page as the landing page that they get mad.

These are the keywords that we’ll be linking to (with the landing page linked in):

Broadcast Training Course
Cloud Training
Fibre Training
Network Training Course
SIP Training
Telecom Training Courses
UMTS Training

By building links to a wide variety of landing pages and also varying the link text (such as using ‘UMTS Training Course’ instead of ‘UMTS Training’ from time to time, and also concentrating on a wide variety of sites to place the links, we are able to build a diverse, effective link portfolio that Google will not be able to criticise.