In the good old days before Google Panda and Google Penguin, building a site and making it a hit was simple and straightforward. All you had to do was to get your hosting package, write regular content, and then spend your free time asking for link exchanges and posting your articles on ezinearticles or other content farms.

These days though it’s a lot less simple. Google has come down hard on websites that try to get to the top of the SERPs by building hundreds of low quality links, and sites like ezinearticles have suffered thanks to the quality of a lot of that content. The only method that’s still recommended these days then is guest posting, but that takes a lot of time, effort and luck (there’s a chance no one will want to publish your posts) and even this method isn’t particularly diverse or natural in terms of your link profile.

It would be nice if there were just some simple rules set out for you to follow that could help you to build a successful site.

Well, while nothing is guaranteed, there are some strategies that should still prove effective and that anyone would do well to attempt. Here, I’ll lay it out simply.

Create a Brand

When you buy your domain and create your site, forget keywords in your name and instead focus on building a recognizable brand. Google likes brands and it’s better for your business plan too.

Write the Right Content

Now you should aim to post as often as possible – the more regular the more chance you’ll have of being a hit. Contrary to old advice, you want to avoid keywords and if anything focus on using synonyms and related terms to try and write ‘around’ your topic instead. Writing articles of a good length is also recommended, with about 700-800 words being particularly Google friendly since the changes.

Share Socially

Google seems to be very interested in social search at the moment, and using their own social network – Google+ – is only logical. Meanwhile you should also share your content on other social sites like Facebook and Reddit, and make sure it’s the sort of thing people will want to share, debate and return to. This way they’ll be likely to see it and post it on forums, comment sections and their own blogs and this will be the number one way for you to build an extensive and natural link profile. This is called ‘link baiting’ and it’s very effective.

Guest Post

Now you should also guest post as well. As long as your visitors and Facebook/Google+/Twitter contacts are sharing your links around, then your guest posts will help to add up and form part of a strong links profile. This can be a thankless task at times, so try to create a systematic way of doing things. E-mail one blog a day for instance keeping track of those you’ve already contacted, or use Postrunner which can automate some of the leg work for you.