So you've been in the link building game for a while, and you're looking for new ideas. You're familiar with reciprocal linking and submitting to directories. And while you realize that such techniques play an important role, you also know that they're really the staple strategies of beginners and amateurs. You're looking for some advanced link-building kung fu to take your site to the next level.
But where do you start? Should you study the technical papers released by the search engines on PageRank, TrustRank, LocalRank, and HITS, attempting to read the tea leaves to discern just what the search engines look for when it comes to evaluating links? Sometimes it feels like you need to go back to college and get your PhD in Information Retrieval Theory before you'll be able to boost your site's rankings.
Actually, none of those things are necessary. Rather, you simply need to develop a feel for the type of links that search engines value most highly, then build your site with an eye toward fostering relationships that will attract those kinds of links.
While that might sound a bit esoteric, the truth is: it's incredibly easy to build links once you've grasped the Zen of:
- how to evaluate links from a search engine's perspective and
- how to build a site that people want to link to.
The Ultimate Secret to Building High Quality Links
Are you ready for the one all-powerful, incredibly-effective link building secret that professionals are using to build huge numbers of incoming links that search engines love? ...perhaps even the single most powerful tool you can use to dominate the search engines? Well, here it is!
Hire a good writer.
Seems a bit anticlimactic, doesn't it? But it's true. A good writer is perhaps the most effective part of a search engine optimization campaign. Every online business should have at least one.
And we're not talking about hiring someone on the cheap from Elance.com to write boring "filler" articles for $5 an pop about stuff everyone already knows. And we're definitely NOT talking about purchasing some automatic article-generating software to crank out reams of useless and meaningless "content".
We're talking about hiring someone who understands your industry and has a flair for creating interesting, useful information that people want to read. Someone who can create articles that build a buzz! ...articles that can be reprinted on your own site to attract links, and syndicated out to other sites in exchange for a link back to you. Someone who can build a blog that generates a hardcore audience of regular readers who can be funneled directly into your sales process. Someone who can establish your businesses identity in the forums and usergroups where your customers are congregating. In short, someone who is contributing real value to the global conversation taking place on the Internet and who is strongly identified as the online face of your business.
When done right, this approach is so massively effective that most people who are doing it won't tell you about it, for fear that if too many people start, this technique will begin to lose its effectiveness.
The amazing this is, they don't really need to worry. Even if everyone knew this secret, most of them wouldn't follow through on it. You can take someone's hand, tell them step-by-step how to make a million dollars, and most people still won't do it. That's human nature. Your job is to be the exception to that rule.
Writing Your Way to a Higher Search Rank
We're not going to spend a lot of time telling you where to find a good writer. You could try Elance.com. (Yes, they have good writers as well as bad ones. You just have to pay the good ones more.) The point is that a good writer should be an essential part of your online business team, just as important (maybe more so) as your webmaster or your bookkeeper.
The first way you can utilize your writer to boost your search engine rank is to have them write articles that can be featured on your site. Articles about your industry, how-to articles and tutorials, or interviews with prominent industry figures. Find a problem plaguing your customers or other businesses in your industry, solve it, then write about your solution.
All of these can make excellent articles, provided they're interesting and useful to your audience (i.e. your current and potential customers, and businesses in your own or related fields).
And compelling content is the key to building incoming links. As an SEO firm, here's the question we hear most often from new clients:
Why isn't my site ranking higher?
In almost every case, the problem is that the site doesn't have enough incoming links. And the reason the site doesn't have more incoming links is because the site is boring and doesn't provide anything worth linking to. Well-written articles go a long way toward solving that problem.
Syndicating Your Articles
While featuring your articles on your site is a great way to attract incoming links, the real value comes when you distribute those articles to other sites in exchange for a link back to your own. There's a huge thirst for articles out there, and it's incredibly easy to find sites eager to reprint your original articles.
As it turns out, many sites are aware that placing compelling content on their sites is a great way to build incoming links. However, most people still haven't realized the enormous link-building advantage that comes from having unique content that can be syndicated to all those other sites in exchange for a link back.
In Part One of this series of Link Building articles, we discussed techniques for finding sites that would make good reciprocal link partners. We also said that reciprocal links are second class links and that the real link building benefit came from getting one-way links that don't require a link back. That's because such links tend to look much more natural to search engines.
Article syndication is a great way to accumulate those one-way incoming links. If you have original articles and content to offer, you can contact every site on your list of potential reciprocal link partners and, instead of begging for reciprocal links, offer them the opportunity to reprint one of your articles on their site in exchange for a link back to your site.
Your link will typically be placed in the author bio or signature at the bottom of the article. Bear in mind that these articles are not sales letters. They're informative content. Trying to sell too hard without providing anything of real value will just turn people off.
Another great way to locate sites that are interested in reprinting your articles is to find authors within your industry who are currently syndicating their articles on other sites. Once you've found an author, searching for that author's name is likely to reveal where else their articles are being reprinted. This will give you a quick-list of sites to contact to get your own articles reprinted.
Article Directories
Not surprisingly, there's a fast, easy way to go about getting your articles out there, and a slower, more methodical way of doing it. The fast way will get you lots of links in a hurry, but they're more likely to be low quality links that will provide less of a search engine benefit—in some cases they may even hurt your efforts to improve your search rank.
On the other hand, the methodical way requires a deep understanding of your industry, learning who the key players are, and developing relationships with them that will get your articles placed on their sites. Getting your articles on the right sites gives you the credibility and perception of expertise that you can't otherwise get through placing your articles on lots of low-quality sites.
However, the methodical approach can also be time consuming and challenging. Sometimes you just want lots of links, and quick. If so, article directories are for you.
Probably the best article directory to get started with is Ezine Articles. This site allows you to submit up to 10 articles for free, after which there is a small charge for each additional article you submit (if your articles are especially good, you may qualify for Expert Author status, where you'll be allowed to continue submitting articles for free).
Ezine Articles may then syndicate these articles out to other sites. This means you get one link from the article directory, and you can expect to pick up additional links if your article gets syndicated.
There are literally hundreds of article directories you can submit to ,but it's best just to limit your submissions to the top 5 or so directories. Here's why. If all your links are coming from article directories only, they'll look a bit contrived to search engines. Therefore, we advise you to limit your links from article directories to less than 10% of your overall linking mix.
Here's a list of some of the top article directories that accept submissions:
http://ezinearticles.com/ (submit)
http://www.goarticles.com/ (submit)
http://www.netterweb.com/ (submit)
Articles submitted to article directories should be fairly short (about 600 words or so). It also helps if they're presented in a way that makes them easy or entertaining to read. Good titles might look like, "10 Steps to ..." or "The Top Ten Ways You Can..." or "The 7 Most Common Mistakes That ...". People love to read lists. It breaks the information up into easily digestible pieces.
By the way, the title is often the most important part of getting an article syndicated. Next time you're standing in the checkout line at the supermarket, take a look at the covers of the magazines there. Cosmo might not win the Pulitzer Prize anytime soon, but they know how to write catchy article titles that get people to buy magazines. So does The National Enquirer (regardless of what you might actually think of their content).
Beyond the eye-catching title, articles about interesting topics or controversial stances on conventional topics are more likely to get read and syndicated out to other sites. Having a good writer on staff can really help in that regard.
Avoid Spreading Your Articles Too Thin
One problem with syndicating your articles out to lots of sites and directories is that you may find it harder to get them printed on the more important sites. Typically, the sites with higher traffic are considered more authoritative than others and, ideally, that's precisely where you want your articles to appear. However, you may find that such sites are only interested in exclusive content that hasn't been previously featured elsewhere.
Usually, an agreement can be worked out where such sites receive exclusive rights for the first month or so that your article is online. After that, you can shop it around to directories and other sites. This strategy can give you the best of both worlds.
Blogging Your Way to Top Rankings
It's true that it's easier to get blogs ranked highly than just about any other type of web site. That still doesn't make it easy. Far from it! Blogs are a huge amount of work, and anyone who underestimates the nearly superhuman effort it takes to maintain a blog and run a business is in for a rude surprise.
This is another reason why it's a good idea to have a writer on staff. In addition to writing articles that build links to your site, that person can be writing and promoting your company's blog while you're busy running your business.
Contrary to popular opinion, blogs are not the magic key to high rankings, but they can be a very effective promotional tool if done right. In fact, we've written an entire report on how to do just that—see our report:
Learn why people are saying BLOG stands for Better Listings On Google!
Reaching Your Customers Through Forums
Another way to utilize a writer is to have them create and maintain a public face for your company in Internet forums. This is a great way to increase your company's exposure and interact directly with potential customers. Like blogging, this is also quite labor-intensive. In order for this to pay dividends, your writer must establish themselves as an authority (preferably a moderator) in the forum before they can expect to have much influence.
You'll get a lot more mileage out of forums by contributing helpful, informed advice than you will by promoting yourself or your business. Once you establish credibility, you'll find that forums can be a fairly reliable source of targeted traffic for your business.
While it's important to establish yourself in the most widely-read forums that relate to your industry, it's also nice if the forum lets you place within your signature line a link back to your company's site. Not only does this make it easier for people to find your site, it also helps build a small amount of link equity along the way.
Distributing Press Releases
Press releases can send you an initial burst of traffic when first syndicated by Google News and others. After that, these same press releases will often be archived in a number of locations. They often remain active for years while providing mature links which continue to contribute to your page's search ranking.
For more on writing and distributing a good press release, see our recent SE Byte: How can I use press releases to optimize my site?
Buying Abandoned Web Sites
It's been estimated that nearly half of all small businesses started in the U.S. fail within the first four years. In the brick-and-mortar world this means closing up shop and letting someone else use the real estate, but in the online world those failed businesses can hang around on life-support for years waiting for things to improve.
Many such businesses could be ripe for purchase at rock-bottom prices. Sure, their (lack-of) profit model might not be enticing, but what about the links they've already accumulated? In terms of initial cash outlay it might be a bit more expensive than other link-building techniques, but when measured in time savings it could be a bargain.
One of the best ways to find those abandoned sites is to do a search in Google for outdated copyrights, such as:
"copyright 2003" + your keywords
Nothing says a site has given up trying like a copyright tag at the bottom of each page that's two or three or more years old. (Hint: to give your customers the impression you're up-to-date, current, and still in business, keep yours updated.)
Obviously, you can also search for copyright 2000, copyright 2001, or any other year that's not current.
Other good searches to find abandoned or under performing sites that can be purchased for cheap include temporarily down for maintenance or under construction. Just make sure the domain name hasn't already expired on the site you're thinking about purchasing. Once a domain expires, Google wipes the slate clean, thereby reducing to zero the value of any incoming links or PageRank the site may have acquired.
Purchasing Links
You can boost your link popularity by purchasing links, but you have to be smart about it. Unless you're very link-savvy, avoid buying links from traditional link brokers. Such brokers typically sell links from sites whose topic is unrelated to yours. These links tend to be placed in a page template which causes you to get a link from every page on that particular site. This is known as a run-of-site link and is an easy way for search engines to tell that the link was purchased.
It's actually much better to get a single link from the homepage of a site than it is to get 100 links from every single subpage of a site. To accomplish this, it's best to contact the owner of the site directly and offer to pay them to put your link on their homepage or, at least, on one of their high-traffic subpages. Remember, you're not just paying for the link popularity; you're also paying for the traffic the link will send you.
By the way, you'll usually have to keep those paid links active for at least 3 or 4 months to really see significant improvement. It can be relatively expensive, since most search engine optimization efforts will take about 6 months before they begin to bear fruit. This is a game for the patient. One potential upside to buying links is that you may be able to offset some of the cost by selling links from your own page once you've attained a high enough PageRank.
Don't pay for any links lower than a PageRank 3. Although lots of little links won't necessarily hurt you, you can't expect them to pack enough link-popularity punch to justify paying for them. One PageRank 7 link (especially if it's on-topic) can be worth hundreds of PageRank 1 or 2 links (possibly more). In other words, links from low PR sites are rarely, if ever, worth purchasing.
Buying Ads in Ezines and Newsletters
Perhaps the best kinds of links to buy are newsletter links. Many sites will send out a monthly or weekly newsletter to subscribers. Those newsletters are also usually archived on the site that published them. This means that not only do you get the targeted traffic from the original mailing of the newsletter, but you also get a permanent link from the archived version of the newsletter—a link which tends to improve with age.
There is strong evidence to indicate that Google puts a time filter on new links in order to diminished the boost people see from purchasing links. This means that you often won't receive the full effect of a link until it has been online for several months.
If you were to buy an expensive, high-PageRank link on the homepage of a popular website, you may have to keep paying to keep that link up for several months before you see any kind of ranking boost. This is why purchasing links in newsletters is good, since such links tend to get archived and hang around without requiring payment to keep them online. As those links mature, they become more valuable.
Getting Links from .edu and .gov Domains
Building and Distributing Software Tools
Ever notice that the homepage for WordPress.org is a PageRank 9? That's largely because of the huge number of sites that use the WordPress blogging software, which conveniently features a powered by WordPress link built into its web interface. Multiply that out over millions of blogs and you get a recipe for a very powerful incoming link structure.
Your business may not be able to duplicate the extraordinary success of WordPress, but their example illustrates a powerful way to accumulate incoming links by building a popular web-based software and distributing it with an embedded backlink in the user interface.
The alternative is to build a tool that's a popular resource and host it on your own site in order to attract links. You've heard us mention MarketLeap's Link Popularity tool: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
That's a PageRank 7 page with 28,800 links in Yahoo (Yahoo gives a more complete picture of the total links to a page than most other search engines). Why the large number of links? Because it's a valuable, free tool used by a large number of people. Ask yourself: is there a valuable tool you could be offering your customers?
The Affiliate Program as Link Magnet
Starting an affiliate program can also be an excellent way to build incoming links. As you may know, many affiliate programs use special modified URLs to track which affiliate is responsible for which sales. For example, Amazon has an enormous number of affiliates linking to them with links that look like:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/123456789
Obviously, each is an incoming link to Amazon. However, in this case, the link is going to a subpage that Amazon probably doesn't care about ranking highly. However, to get better mileage from such an incoming link, you might consider redirecting the link to pass PageRank and link equity to your site's homepage by using the 301 redirect and/or a tool like Mod_Rewrite—both of which you can learn more about by reviewing the following reports:The Social Aspect of Link Building
There's an often-overlooked social networking aspect to link building. If you're well-known, and have a lot of connections in your industry or an industry closely related to yours, then it can be easy to use those connections to get links to your site. Hypothetically, if you had a site that sold bodybuilding supplements, and your uncle was Arnold Schwarzenegger, you probably wouldn't have much trouble getting him to link to your site from his own.
This tongue-in-cheek example just illustrates the fact that who you are and who you know plays a big role in link building. You may find that networking and going to industry conferences to make contacts is a much more effective link-building strategy than just about anything else you can do.
Finding the Right Link Balance
You'll want to avoid letting your incoming link structure get too homogeneous. Incoming links from only one type of site or only to your homepage or all with identical anchor text are telltale clues that could potentially cause a search engine to flag your site for an unnatural link structure.
Instead, strive for an 80/20 balance, That is, 80% of your links from topically relevant sources, and 20% from unrelated or marginally related sources. 80% of your incoming links going to your homepage, 20% of your links going to subpages deeper within your site. 80% of your links with your keywords in the anchor text, 20% percent with "click here" or your domain name in the anchor text. 80% of your links are one-way links, 20% are reciprocal. And so on.
Of course, these numbers are just general, and somewhat arbitrary, guidelines. The point is that you don't want your site to appear overly-optimized, so it's important to mix things up a bit.
Is Having a Great Site Enough?
Some webmasters claim that having the best site for your category will be enough to attract all the links you'll ever need. They profess that time spent on building links is actually better spent on improving your web site. Although this is partially true, we still find the following logic disconnect:
The fact remains that there are many, many great sites
that provide top notch content BUT get very meager traffic
because of poor search engine positioning.
Other sites would surely link to them IF they knew about them. But, without links to get them seen in the search engines in the first place, people simply don't find them and, thus, no one ever links to them.
To paraphrase an old saying: it takes links to make links!.
As your site improves its search engine ranking, you'll begin to see a sort of snowball effect in which you start acquiring links without even asking for them, simply because your site is more visible. Webpages that enjoy top rankings for a competitive keyword can often acquire large numbers of links without even trying. But if you're link-poor, it can be extraordinarily challenging to get a leg up without actively seeking links.
No Missing Links
When just starting out, getting links can be a challenging and time consuming process. Many of your efforts may prove fruitless when sites decline to link to you no matter what you do.
However, the smart marketer knows that competitors have already blazed the trail. In many cases, the way to start is by finding pages that rank well for your keywords, and emulating your competitors' link-building strategies. By offering content to sites that are linking to your competitors, and integrating the strategies outlined above, you'll soon find your pages in the mainstream. In due time, persistence will pay off, and you'll rise to the top.
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