Link Building part III - Further Techniques
Friday, 1. May 2009, 13:15:10
Ok, so you've built your base of links, you're commenting on forums and blogs and you've submitted to countless directories. Now, you want to move forward and get beyond all that and get some really valuable links. How do you go about it?
The base of really good link building is getting people to link to you, not going out trawling for places to put links. These links can be of a much higher quality than the ones you'll get from forums and blog comments.
Sharing Content/Articles
Write an article, make it in-depth and useful. Then submit it to article repositories and include a link back to your site. There are hundreds out there, and there are even tools that will reword your article and automically get it posted on many of these sites. See my piece on Article Spinning for more info. Especially useful if your website is article based, as you've got the content already done!
Press Releases
When I worked at Diseño Earle last year, our team designed an Eco House. With eco-architecture being such a hot topic I drafted a press release and sent it out to 4 prominent architecture blogs. We were featured on all 4 of the blogs within a couple of days and got prime position links from those high PR sites. Within the following week we ended up being featured on over 200 other architecture, design and eco blogs and gained almost 400 links. Not bad for about an hours work! You have to have something exciting though, and you need to write your press release well. But for very little effort, the results can be staggering.
Viral Videos
Check out what I wrote about Blendtec and their Will it Blend phenomenom as well. A great idea can spread like wildfire throughout the web and can bring some astonishing results.
Link Baiting
Link Baiting sounds a little ominous, but its a very fair and valid method of getting links. Link baiting involves producing a really useful utility, or a fun game, or just some great content, that people can put on their site for their visitors or simply link to. A great example I've seen around is a Foreign Exchange calculator. Very useful to a multitude of websites and normally well placed on a page when used. Other examples include Flash Games, Top Ten lists, viral videos. How-to guides are also a great idea, these can be great resources and if they're good, they'll get you links. Good, solid natural links, just as Google likes them.
Off-site Content
Writing off-site content can be very useful. Very now, very hip, very web 2.0. There are many sites that allow you to write the content - wikipedia is the biggest example of user-generated content. Squidoo provides a great platform for placing off-site content. I've seen a Squidoo lens about some smoothie recipes with PR of 5, so make a lens, make it useful and people will link to it. Put your links in your Off Site content and reap the rewards!
As you can see, the point of all of these is KILLER CONTENT. The better your content, the more interesting your content, the higher the likelyhood of you gaining great links is. And it's with these great links that you're going to see the best results.
As of Monday, I'm going to be doing a case study of Inside Out Health Magazine's website, which is owned by my friend James.. I'm going to take the site through a complete SEO plan from start to finish. It's a great site, with lots of high-quality content so there's lots to work with, and hopefully it should give all of you some great ideas on how to organise successful SEO campaign.
Have a great weekend!
The base of really good link building is getting people to link to you, not going out trawling for places to put links. These links can be of a much higher quality than the ones you'll get from forums and blog comments.
Sharing Content/Articles
Write an article, make it in-depth and useful. Then submit it to article repositories and include a link back to your site. There are hundreds out there, and there are even tools that will reword your article and automically get it posted on many of these sites. See my piece on Article Spinning for more info. Especially useful if your website is article based, as you've got the content already done!
Press Releases
When I worked at Diseño Earle last year, our team designed an Eco House. With eco-architecture being such a hot topic I drafted a press release and sent it out to 4 prominent architecture blogs. We were featured on all 4 of the blogs within a couple of days and got prime position links from those high PR sites. Within the following week we ended up being featured on over 200 other architecture, design and eco blogs and gained almost 400 links. Not bad for about an hours work! You have to have something exciting though, and you need to write your press release well. But for very little effort, the results can be staggering.
Viral Videos
Check out what I wrote about Blendtec and their Will it Blend phenomenom as well. A great idea can spread like wildfire throughout the web and can bring some astonishing results.
Link Baiting
Link Baiting sounds a little ominous, but its a very fair and valid method of getting links. Link baiting involves producing a really useful utility, or a fun game, or just some great content, that people can put on their site for their visitors or simply link to. A great example I've seen around is a Foreign Exchange calculator. Very useful to a multitude of websites and normally well placed on a page when used. Other examples include Flash Games, Top Ten lists, viral videos. How-to guides are also a great idea, these can be great resources and if they're good, they'll get you links. Good, solid natural links, just as Google likes them.
Off-site Content
Writing off-site content can be very useful. Very now, very hip, very web 2.0. There are many sites that allow you to write the content - wikipedia is the biggest example of user-generated content. Squidoo provides a great platform for placing off-site content. I've seen a Squidoo lens about some smoothie recipes with PR of 5, so make a lens, make it useful and people will link to it. Put your links in your Off Site content and reap the rewards!
As you can see, the point of all of these is KILLER CONTENT. The better your content, the more interesting your content, the higher the likelyhood of you gaining great links is. And it's with these great links that you're going to see the best results.
As of Monday, I'm going to be doing a case study of Inside Out Health Magazine's website, which is owned by my friend James.. I'm going to take the site through a complete SEO plan from start to finish. It's a great site, with lots of high-quality content so there's lots to work with, and hopefully it should give all of you some great ideas on how to organise successful SEO campaign.
Have a great weekend!
WIDGETIZE
Anonymous # 1. May 2009, 16:25
I'm still really on Part II at the moment, building the directories and finding a list of useful blogs and forms. But a question from the post today - you say to submit articles and that this is especially easy if the its an article based site - so can i submit article that are already on my site? I thought google penalised site for duplicate content? Is that right?
www.iohmagazine.com
sugarcanegray # 3. May 2009, 10:45
In regards to duplicate content, Google DOES NOT penalise duplicate content in the sense that it will negatively effect the SEO of your site. However, Google does IGNORE duplicate content it finds and will only index 1 instance of the guilty content, and therefore ignore the links on the pages with the duplicate content.
What you have to do is use a technique called Article Spinning. Check out what I wrote a couple of weeks ago in the post: SEO your site with Article Spinning.
Good luck!
Anonymous # 6. May 2009, 19:40
any suggestions for the best way to find the number of incoming links to a site - some of the tools i found via google seem to vary the numbers!?
sugarcanegray # 7. May 2009, 09:49
It's impossible to get a definitive list on exactly how many links a site has. If it's your site, install Google's Webmaster Tools, this will give you a good idea of links you have. Bear in mind it can take a week or two for new links to show up. To find links for other sites, head on over to Yahoo and enter the following into the search bar:
link:www.domainname.com
obviously replacing the "domainname" with the site you're trying to learn about. This will then give you a very good idea of the inbound links a site has garnered.
Use this information to your advantage. It shows you which sites, most likely on topic sites, that links from count towards an SEO plan. Visit the sites and get your links on there.
Good luck!
verticalmeasures # 29. June 2009, 21:10
One of the best advanced link building tools is Linkscape by SEOmoz. It's a very valuable link building tool. It will cost you money, but it's well worth it.