20 Tips for Link Building
June 28th, 2007 Posted in UncategorizedSooner or later anyone involved in online marketing is going to have to do some link building. Link building simply getting other sites to link to your site. In the SEO industry most people focus on link building for the search engines but of at least equal importance is the obvious fact that it will increase traffic simply by people following the links.
1. Requesting reciprocal links
This is the most obvious way to start, it’s quite easy to agree link exchanges with websites, especially if it’s a website with a links page. Unfortunately there are a couple of snags with this approach:
- reciprocal links are not nearly as effective as one-way links
- generally only relatively lowly ranked sites will link exchange with you
My attitude to reciprocal links is like Groucho Marx on clubs - “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”. Yes, I would love to exchange links with Microsoft or Google but the people who do want to exchange links probably have lower traffic/lower PageRank than I do and aren’t worth the bother. Some of them are even in bad neighborhoods and will worsen your position.
2. Paid directories
Business.com and Yahoo! Directory are two of the high quality general directories that will really help. There are also plenty of industry and regional directories that may well make sense for your business - but check out their traffic and PageRank ratings before you reach for your credit card.
3. Free directories
There are a truly huge number of free directories out there however most of them are of very low quality. The Open Directory Project is by far the best but is very hard to get listed in. Again, there may be other good quality directories for your region or niche.
4. Suppliers
t’s a great idea to offer your suppliers case studies or quotations for their websites - providing they include a link back to you.
5. Customers
Depending on your product you might be able to offer your customers a “Powered By” button or you could even take the Intel approach and offer your customers a discount if they include you in their marketing.
6. Trade associations
Trade associations often have highly rated websites and it’s usually relatively easy to get a link from them.
7. Local newspapers
CNN or the BBC are great places to get links from, however it’s normally much more practical to get a link from your local newspapers.
8. Give something away
When I first started out in online marketing giving away a screen saver was considered the height of coolness and resulted in lots of traffic. Nowadays you really need to be giving away something of much higher quality such as a good piece of software, an e-book, music or some sort of useful online service.
9. Blog
Blogs are so important that I’m going to write about them in much more detail. The advice in short is:
- Get a blog
- Write interesting articles in it frequently
- Promote it
- That’s it
10. Podcast
Podcasts are basically just audio blogs. There are far fewer podcasts than blogs so it’s a bit easier to get some exposure for your podcast. The downside is that it’s a lot of work to put together, I tend to spend a few days on a podcast verses half an hour for a blog post!
I’m doing a podcast for Head Resourcing in the new year so I’ll blog a bit more about the process then.
11. Press releases
Writing a good press releases and then distributing first to one or two selected journalists to give them an exclusive and then following it up by sending it through PRWeb or PR Newswire (I slightly prefer PR Newswire but PR Web is cheaper).
12. Forums
It’s a good idea to get actively involved in forums on your subject, to build a reputation as an expert. Most forum software will allow you to set a signature with your URL in it.
The same comments apply to mail lists.
13. del.icio.us
del.icio.us (along with digg, reddit.com and StumbleUpon) are tools for people to share their favourite sites. If lots of users of the site recommend the same content then you are likely to get a lot of traffic.
It’s a good idea to include “Post to del.icio.us” links on your content and you should certainly explore these communities.
14. Newsgroups
In 1994 Canter & Siegel posted the first commercial spam to Usenet and unleashed a tide of junk that towards the end of the 1990s was making a lot of newsgroups unusable.
However there is absolutely wrong with post informed comments to newsgroups with your website address in your signature. It’s even okay to advertise providing it’s appropriate for the group and it’s a good idea to put ‘ADV:’ in the subject line.
Many newsgroups are also mirrored onto the web so you will get extra benefit.
15. Squidoo
Squidoo is a hugely popular website which allows you to put together a “lens” on a particular subject. It’s a great way of gathering together useful resources on a subject, including of course, your website.
16. GeoURL
GeoURL is a project to map where people who run websites are. You need to look up your latitude and longitude using a map site and then add them into an ICBM meta tag on your page (this is a geeky joke, the tag supposedly shows where to send an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile should someone powerful want to take your blog down).
17. Wikipedia
This is a bit controversial however providing your site meets the requirements of Wikipedia’s External links policy then it should be okay to get it linked from appropriate pages. You are not supposed to link to your own site so you should really suggest it to one of the authors of the relevant page.
18. Suggest related links to Alexa
You should be using Alexa anyway for the traffic ratings and while you are there go to your competitors’ websites and suggest your site as a related link.
19. Write a book
When I worked as a content management consultant I was the co-author of a book on the subject. I wasn’t paid anything for my work but I estimate that I made around $300,000 as a result of the publicity.
A good e-book is virtually free to produce and doesn’t need to be very lengthy as long as the content is compelling; some good e-books are less than 100 pages.
20. Rip-off your competitors
It’s really good to study your competitors to work out where their links are coming from - particularly competitors who are scoring higher than you. Typing link:www.example.com into the search box will give you the links to your site on Google, Yahoo and MSN.