New SEO is all about creating a sustainable business.

After all, that’s the point of SEO, isn’t it? I remember when I first got into the SEO game… I had dreams of passive income every single night! Well, SEO didn’t quite turn out to be that passive.

But here’s the reality – SEO can be somewhat passive, but first you need to put in a significant amount of time building your site upright, through the New SEO! If you use New SEO tactics, you’ll be building a sustainable business that can withstand Google updates for a long time.

In fact, as long as Google continues to use the same philosophy they’ve used since their inception, your site will do well on the search rankings.

In today’s article, we’ll be talking about one idea of New SEO. Mainly, how to build a link that Google wants you to have!

What is “Natural?”

First, it’s important to talk about an “unnatural” link. Essentially, when you decide to take things into your own hands – when you decide to start building links, that’s when you run the risk of building an unnatural link.

In general, unnatural links are:

  • coming from low-quality sites with thin filler content
  • very easy to replicate and scale
  • have perfectly optimized anchor text
  • point to the same page on your website

Now, here’s where many SEO’s have issues. It’s very easy to see what types of links are unnatural – basically, every type of link you can build in SEO is unnatural. So the issue is, if these links are unnatural, what links can I build? Is there any way to increase my rankings, or do I just have to pray someone links to me naturally?

Well, ideally, you have a website with phenomenal content – content people want to read and link to. However, even if you have top-notch content (which you better have!), it can still be difficult to gain traction in the rankings at first.

How to Build Natural Links


Building natural links is actually very simple and intuitive. It revolves around a keyword: VALUE!

If you can create content that’s incredibly valuable, people will link to it. That’s obvious! But what might not be obvious, is if you can create incredibly valuable content for someone else, they’ll link to you, and you’ll likely get links from anyone who views your content on that person’s site!

This is what the strategy involves – giving incredible value to other website owners (the higher quality the site the better). In return, they’ll almost always give a nice, juicy, NATURAL link!

Here’s a quick example:

I wanted to get a nice, high-quality link for an e-commerce store I do SEO for. The store is in the heating niche. So what I did was compile some interesting facts and ideas about heating that most people don’t think about right away.

Then I put that information into an infographic. It wasn’t easy… took me two days to complete.

Once it was finished, I submitted it to a super high-quality authority site in my niche. And guess what? They ate it up! They loved it, and they loved linking and sending traffic to us!

We didn’t tell them what kind of anchor text to use… they just gave us a pure, high-quality natural link.

This is what New SEO is all about. It’s about identifying what Google really wants and figuring out ways you can play within Google’s rules to take initiative. 

Yes, making an infographic is MUCH more difficult than submitting a garbage article to 100 different directories.

However, the link I gained from this submission is likely worth THOUSANDS of article directory submissions, AND, it’s not likely to get me in trouble with Google any time soon!

This is SEO Google wants you to be doing. In all the past major updates, Google has been eliminating SEO strategies that game Google’s algorithms. However, Google does have a system set up that allows the top-quality sites to get to page #1 for any search term. Therefore, it makes much more sense to play within Google’s rules instead of going against them.

Because remember – at the end of the day, Google owns Google! So if we want to use it to get juicy, buying traffic, instead of using a strategy that will work for a few months (at best), why not use a strategy that’s built for the long-term?

What about Anchor Text?

The question of anchor text is still heavily debated. However, ever since the Penguin Update, websites with too many optimized anchor text links have been penalized consistently.

The reason is simple: Google wants natural SEO, i.e., SEO that happens without the optimizer needing to game Google’s algorithm.

Google has designed an algorithm that works alongside online businesses, to give rankings to the businesses that provide the most value. In other words, if your business provides value, people will link to it. And the more natural links you have, the better your site will do in the rankings.

If you spend your time building thousands of anchor text optimized backlinks, that is clearly gaming Google’s algorithm. Because the everyday person doesn’t understand that anchor text means anything in links. Therefore, they don’t optimize anchor texts when linking.

In other words, over-optimized anchor text is unnatural!

Therefore, we can determine if the over-optimized anchor text is unnatural and hurts websites, taking the natural route will have the opposite effect: increasing our rankings!

How Do People Link?

When you link to a page, how do you do it? In general, it depends on the type of website. But for most people, when linking, a copy+paste of the link is sufficient. So if your website is www.moneymakingtips.com, the majority of your links will likely be that exact anchor text: www.moneymakingtips.com.

If someone does change the anchor text, it generally includes the brand name. So someone may not just copy and paste, but instead, they’ll use your brand name as the anchor text. In our above example, it would be “money-making tips”.

This is how people link. They link to your brand. And this is how Google wants you to build your business! By building a strong brand, and building links to that brand, you build your brand authority.

If you are going to build links, instead of using perfectly optimized anchor text, try thinking like the average visitor. Build links that are naturally optimized, not over-optimized with perfect anchor text!

But How Do I Rank For Specific Keywords?

Now, it’s easy enough to say, “build natural links”. But this presents a problem. One of the main reasons why you’d use optimized anchor text is to rank for specific keywords. For example, with our money-making tips website, one such keyword could be “make money online”.

Really, the solution to this problem is simple. You can still build optimized anchor text links, but not in bulk! This is why brand authority is so important. You build up the authority for your domain, and then you can send a very small handful of perfectly optimized links for a specific keyword. Then, thanks to your original brand authority, these links will have exponentially more power than before.

One Step Further

Also, if you’d like to rank for specific keywords, remember how people link to websites, and use that to your advantage!

For example, if you wanted to rank a page for “make money online”, you could have permalinks like this: www.moneymakingtips.com/make-money-online.

What we’ve done here is very simple. We’ve included the keyphrase we’re targeting in the permalink. This way, when someone links to our site using the most common method (copy and paste), they’ll automatically be linking with optimized anchor text! And this will be a completely natural link!

Closing Thoughts

As you can see, post-Panda and Penguin link building is different, but not completely. Really, it’s all about doing what we should’ve been doing all along: focusing on the BRAND, not the individual pages we want ranking!

If the brand has enough SEO authority, you’ll find yourself easily gaining rankings for competitive keywords you’re also targeting – especially if you build a handful of optimized links and take advantage of permalinks!

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