Creating a solid link building strategy is the first place to start. If your website has already been around for a while, you’ll want to start by analysing its current link profile in order to determine the value of the various links to your website using the tools mentioned in Part 6 of this guide. You’ll need to identify the ones holding you back and then work on removing them before determining how you are going to generate more authoritative links for your website.In this guide, we’ll take a look at fifty ways to build links, get rid of the bad ones and make use of a variety of tools to help simplify the process.
Part 1: Link Building with Your Website
1. Add social sharing buttons to your website: Encourage social sharing of your content by adding social media buttons to your blog posts and other pages. Most content management systems provide this facility by way of a plugin. AddThis or Filament provide “stand out” social sharing icons that really work.
2. Provide an RSS feed: RSS feeds help to increase the exposure of your website by providing an easy way for people to subscribe to regular updates about your content.
3. Create internal links: Internal links between posts, accompanied by context-relevant anchor text help both people and the search engines to navigate your website more effectively.
4. Ensure your links can be crawled: Although not directly related to link building itself, you should ensure that every element of your website, including both its internal and external links, can be crawled by the search engine spiders, and this means avoiding placing links in Javascript or Flash content.
5. Write Web-friendly content: Writing for the Web is quite different from writing for print, and opting to publish Web-friendly content such as lists and how-to articles will help to encourage engagement and social sharing.
6. Use a variety of mediums: Rather than relying largely on text content as link bait, use images, infographics and video to widen your reach and get more people to share your content.
7. Follow current trends: Keep up to date with the latest trending topics using services such as Google Trends. Content that follows the latest trends tends to make for excellent link bait.
8. Publish interviews: As your site starts to grow, start interviewing others in your industry, since you’ll be able to leverage both your own audience and that of the person you are interviewing. Who is an “influencer” in your industry?
9. Join an affiliate program: Running an affiliate program allows you to secure backlinks on your participant’s website. Just be sure that you choose partners who are likely to benefit your own audience.
10. Publish an email newsletter: If you’re running an e-commerce website or any other online business venture, offer an opt-in email newsletter subscription to your audience, and make sure that your newsletters contain links and social sharing features.
11. Fix 404 page errors: One of the most common frustrations of the Internet is the 404 error page that appears when a page cannot be found. Ensure that you don’t have any dead links on your website to minimize the chances of this error popping up.
12. Use Twitter and Facebook markup: Placing Twitter Cards and Facebook Open Graph markup in your HTML code allows you to optimise the way your content looks when it is shared on social networks.
AddThis, as mentioned earlier provides a free range of plugins and other premium tools to help facilitate social sharing on your website.
Part 2: Link Building with Social Media Sites
13. Create a Facebook page: With around 1.4 billion active users, every business should have a Facebook page for providing updates and reaching out to a wider audience.
14. Create a Twitter profile: Another invaluable social media resource, Twitter is also useful for posting updates and building up a large follower base.
15. Create a Google+ profile: Unsurprisingly, having a Google+ profile benefits your link profile and standing in the search engines while also providing modern social networking functions.
16. Create a LinkedIn page: The number one social networking site for businesses and professionals, backlinks coming from LinkedIn tend to be highly authoritative.
17. Answer questions: Question and answer websites, such as Yahoo Answers, provide a platform for people to help each other, and you can often include a link to your website in your own answers.
18. Join forums: By participating in forums relevant to your niche, you can help to reach out to potential leads and customers by participating in conversations, and you can usually place a backlink in your signature.
19. Publish videos on YouTube: The world’s number one video sharing website also has its social elements, largely in the form of comments. People also love to share videos, and great video content can make for effective link bait.
20. Inspire conversation: Encouraging conversation applies to every social network and your website itself, since it makes people all the more likely to share your links, effectively providing you with some free advertising.
21. Claim your local listings: If you’re a local business, be sure to claim your local listings on sites such as Google Places, Bing Places and Yelp. You’ll also be able to place a link to your website in your profile.
22. Use niche social networks: Some of the smaller social networks are specifically tailored to a certain niche or industry, and if you find any that apply, don’t be afraid of trying them out.
23. Participate in other social groups: With regards to social media marketing and link building, don’t forget that you need to go beyond your own profiles and participate in other people’s groups and conversations as well.
Local businesses should be sure to claim their listings on Google Places, since they will also appear on Google Local searches and Google Maps.
Part 3: Link Building with Promotions and Paid Advertising
24. Offer discounts: Everyone loves a special offer, and people are all the more likely to tell their friends about a generous offer by posting links on their own social media profiles and other online portals.
25. Offer a freebie: Similarly to offering a discount, offering something for free is a sure-fire way to attract organic backlinks to your website.
26. Sponsor an event: Though you’ll need to pay for it, by sponsoring a community event, you should be able to get a link on the website that you’re sponsoring. Better still you’ll get exposure.
27. Use Google AdWords: Google AdWords is the world’s number one pay-per-click advertising program, and for e-commerce websites, it provides an excellent way to build up more traffic.
28. Use Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads works in a similar way, also allowing you to set a daily advertising budget.
29. Use Twitter Promoted Tweets: Twitter’s paid advertising services allow you to promote your Tweets so that they get more exposure, keeping your links more visible for longer in the process.
30. Use other paid opportunities: There are numerous other paid opportunities, such as LinkedIn, paid banner advertising and more. You just have to figure out which is right for you.
Google AdWords is the world’s premier pay-per-click advertising service with sponsored ads also appearing in Google Search as seen above.
Part 4: Link Building with External Content
31. Write guest blog posts: Done correctly, writing guest blogging is one of the most effective ways of all to build authoritative links. Find a quality, relevant website, and offer to write a guest post for free.
32. Comment on blog posts: Though blog comments are often abused by spam, participating in a useful capacity can also help to increase the exposure of your website. Having converstations with other industry influencers can only be good for yor business.
33. Contact webmasters directly: Don’t randomly approach a number of webmasters directly regarding exchanging links. This is not good practice.
34. Create Citations: You should be wary of submitting your website to directories, since many of them are poor quality, though there are still some quality paid services – check out brightlocal.com
35. Share content on social bookmarking sites: Services such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious are useful for sharing newly published content, and others may do the same.
36. Conduct competitive research: Using the tools mentioned later on in this guide, conduct a bit of competitive research to find out who is linking to your most successful competitors. This will then provide your platform for outreach.
37. Build partnerships: By using your social networks and organising both online and offline events, you can reach out to potential partners and establish a mutually beneficial business arrangement.
38. Buy advertising space: Either using an affiliate program or by approaching webmasters directly, you can purchase on-site advertising space for things like banner ads or even just simple links.
Part 5: Links to Remove
39. Purchased links: Although there’s nothing wrong with buying advertising space, using mass link-buying services is against Google’s terms of use, and it will likely get your website de-indexed.
40. Links on content mills: Content mills are often saturated in low-quality, mass-produced content written largely to attract clicks from the search engine results. Don’t waste your time with them.
41. Links on low-quality sites: The quality of the website linking to you is a reflection of the quality of your own site as well, so make sure that you don’t end up having too many links on content farms and poor-quality directories.
42. Links on irrelevant sites: Similarly, links on irrelevant sites also reflect badly on your own site, since they provide little or no benefit to human users.
43. Social and blog comment spam: While social media and blog commenting can be invaluable for link building, it is essential that you only speak when you have something to say. Post a link with your website is regarded as spamming.
Part 6: Tools of the Trade
44. Open Site Explorer: Moz’s Open Site Explorer provides a wealth of useful features for analysing either your own link profile or that of a competitor. There is also a fairly full-featured free version.
45. Majestic SEO: Similar to Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO is another web-based tool that allows you to see which sites are linking to a particular website.
46. Google Analytics: The premier free SEO and Web analytics tool, Google Analytics provides an extensive range of features, including the ability to learn more about a website’s link profile.
47. Screaming Frog: Unlike the other popular tools, Screaming Frog is a desktop application that allows you to analyse both the internal and external link profile of a website.
48. Raven SEO Tools: One of the more expensive Web-based tools on the market, Raven SEO Tools includes the Link Manager program which is excellent for finding potential link partners.
49. Competitive Landscape Analyser: Developed by Link Research, this tool is one of the most powerful and effective for analysing and building up your link profile, since it allows you to compare link profiles and much more.
Conclusion
Although the above takes a look at the various good practices for link building as well as some of those that you should avoid, it is most important that you place the emphasis on quality rather than quantity. Given that Google has, in recent years, cracked down heavily on many unnatural linking activities, you should now be focussing your energies on generating links organically. Finally, don’t forget that any link should be useful in some way to human users, and not placed there primarily for the search engines. If you remember this fundamental rule, you shouldn’t go wrong.
And the Number 50
50. Share and comment on this article: If you do, you’ll more than likely get some exposure. But ultimately I hope you found this artcle useful.
Resources
Open Site Explorer — https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/
Majestic SEO — https://majestic.com/
Google Analytics — http://www.google.com/analytics/
Screaming Frog — http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
Raven SEO Tools — http://raventools.com/
Competitive Landscape Analyser — http://www.linkresearchtools.com/tools/cla/
AddThis — https://www.addthis.com/
Link Schemes — https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
The post 50 Ways to Build Links (what you need to know) appeared first on Elite Group Marketing.
