 I’m a huge fan of top 10 lists of all types from the classic Letterman to the modern Digg meme posts. So today I’ve compiled a list of some of the key points to consider when promoting link building for your site. The interesting “Art Imitating Life (or SEO)” bit here is that lists tend to be one of the more successful viral techniques for link building…which brings me to my Link Building List – and just to be different it’s a Top 11:
1. Create lists
Create an interesting list to produce viral link-bait – content that is interesting enough to “bait” many people to either link to it or bookmark it via social bookmarking sites like Digg. The fun thing about lists is that they can be completely unrelated to your site or industry and still be a valid format for a linking strategy. From an SEO context perspective, however, the list content should be somewhat related.
2. Develop authority
This one is a bit intangible, but if you can prove that you are an authority on a topic, people will link to you and the search engines might even like you better.
3. Serialize content & syndication
Produce compelling serial content and push this content out into the inter-blog-cyber-sphere. The more people read your content, the more likely they will send it to others or link directly to it and ultimately this will increase both your authority and your links. Alternately, pull in compelling serial content to your site (with permission of course) from external sources and feeds. Nobody says the content on your site needs to be 100% proprietary (ok your compliance dept. might). Examples of Serial content: RSS feeds, Articles, News feeds, FAQs, Press Releases, Newsletters .
4. Use directories
Submit your site to directories – simple enough as long as you stick to the legitimate ones like DMOZ and Yahoo. Get yourself on a few of the old-school “link-farms” and this strategy starts to work against you really quick. Generally speaking, stick to the directories you know and make sure that you are only getting placed into appropriate “contextual” categories (vs grouped with many unrelated sites with unrelated categories). When in doubt, you could always create a legitimate directory of your own – perhaps with affiliate industry sites or relevant complementary sites.
5. Leverage social bookmarking
Encourage visitors to use a social bookmarking site (or meme trackers such as Digg) to promote your site content. This is as simple as placing the social bookmarking icons and/or links as close to your content as possible. Submit interesting content to these sites directly and encourage everybody you know to do the same. For most sites, hitting the first page of Digg for even a short time will send more traffic to your site then you could imagine. Of course, nothing says that all of this traffic will be qualified but it might lead to further linking which is always a good thing.
6. Get involved locally and “industrially”
If your target audience is local, sign up for as many local business directories and associations as possible (Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Local Listings, News sites etc.). Also sign up for any associations, affiliate sites or industry specific sites for your business or product. Definitely find ways to be associated (and linked) with educational and government sites. Generally speaking, links from .edu and .gov (also .org) will automatically provide higher link authority than any .com.
7. Promote interaction and constructive criticism
This one is a little tricky, but people really like to read what others think and then add their two cents as well. These days, allowing people to review your product or comment on an article, along with proper moderation (not full on policing) can be an extremely successful means of producing traffic and linking. Although there is always a fine line between constructive criticism and all out product bashing, the public is much more savvy and is much more likely to trust a company that allows conversation and external reviewing of products or services. And once conversations start they often grow a life of their own and draw traffic.
8. Blog and be blogged
This might be obvious but a huge source of links and authority on the internet these days comes from the blogging community (aka the blogosphere). Having bloggers (especially industry specific or high profile bloggers) blog about you or your product or service can often cause a great deal of buzz in the blogging community and as such result in many links back to your site. On the other hand, having a corporate blog or industry expert blogs produced by your company or staff can also be very effective. Not only does it show that your company is progressive and current, it might also position you and your staff as experts (or not, depending on the quality of the content in the posts) for your industry and related topics. At the very least, blogging will allow a dialogue between your company and your visitors. Of course, forums can act in much the same way but traditionally are much more involved to maintain and moderate.
9. Trade and buy links, PPC & advertisements
There really is nothing wrong with good old fashioned advertising and there’s certainly nothing wrong with soliciting the right sites for the right links back to yours (reciprocal or otherwise). As always, be careful how you do this and definitely be diligent if you are buying links (i.e. signing up for an ad service or Pay-Per-Click.) to ensure that you are paying for a service that is white-hat and won’t be detrimental to your rankings.
10. Give stuff away
Everyone likes a good deal, especially just about anything free. There are always opportunities to promote your site by offering incentives on the cheap. Promoting these offers around to meme trackers, blogging sites, even forums will often become a viral link juggernaut (especially if the deal is a great one) quicker than you can say “free t-shirt”.
11. Be social
This has been touched on in some of the items above, but the bottom line is to get out there (metaphorically and literally) to interact with those who could become visitors, linkers and maybe even converters. Comment on blogs, interact on forums, get involved with social media and social networking communities and even physically get out and go to industry tradeshows, have your staff speak as experts at conferences, join local committees and networks that allow every opportunity for people to get to know who you are and what you do.
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About The Author
Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance. Connect and collaborate with him on Twitter.
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