We've gotten lots of great feedback on our recent series of link-building articles. Several readers have asked us how we would personally go about getting a site's link-building campaign off the ground. While link-building is a complex topic that's largely unique to every site, there are several standard techniques that can apply to almost any situation.
Keep in mind that, as your site matures, link-building becomes more and more about finding creative ways to promote your site and build business relationships with sites related to yours. However, for a new site, or for an older site that never got much link-building attention to begin with, there are a number of concrete steps that any site can take to lay the foundation for a strong incoming link structure.
With that in mind, let's get started with a step-by-step plan to get your link-building campaign started on the right foot.
1. Start by submitting your site to the top directories.
This is the easiest, quickest way to get a trusted inbound link. We'll cover the basics here, but be sure to read part ten of our recent report, 15 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links, for further details on submitting your site to directories.
Our research team here at SearchEngineNews.com has compiled a list of the top directories, which you can find at:
http://www.searchenginenews.com/se-news/directory-master.html
Remember, it can be dangerous to add too many links at once, since doing so can trip a search engine's spam filters and possibly cause your site to be penalized. Don't submit your site to all these directories at once. Instead, start at the top of the list and submit your site to three directories a week until your site is listed in all the directories in that list.
After two months you'll have added your site to about 25 of the top directories, resulting in 25 incoming links from 25 different sites and 25 different IP C-blocks. Of course, this is only a rough estimate since some of the sites (like DMOZ) can take an exceptionally long time to add your site while others (like Yahoo) will also add your site to several of their international directories, resulting in more links.
By the way, you might be wondering if it's worth the $299 to submit to the Yahoo Directory. Our opinion is that it is. Let's face it, search marketing can be challenging and pricey. Whether you're writing articles, building relationships with link partners, or submitting to directories, it's going to take some time, money and energy. In this context, a batch of guaranteed links from an authoritative site and its English-speaking related directories is a bargain at $299. Bear in mind that getting listed in Yahoo's main directory generally includes listings in Yahoo Canada, Yahoo India, Yahoo UK, Yahoo Australia and New Zealand, Yahoo Singapore, and others.
A few words about directories: Google is beginning to place less importance on links from directories. This is likely because directories are such an easy places to get links from. Another concern is that any site with links coming primarily from directories may be flagged as being over-optimized in the eyes of Google, and thus penalized.
For these reasons, we advise you not to overly rely on directories to build your link popularity. Directories are a good way to get a new site off the ground, and can help give any site a boost, but you should also focus on getting links from other sources. A good rule is that for every directory link you get, you should also have at least 5-10 links from non-directory sources.
Regardless, we still consider directories to be an excellent vehicle for building a site's link popularity. Also keep in mind that even if the influence of directory links is slipping at Google, they're still quite effective at boosting pages within the ranks at Yahoo and MSN.
2. Next, target article directories.
Write a short article (500-700 words) about some topic related to your business, then submit that article to each of the top ten article directories found in our Directory Master chart.
Repeat this process with a new article every week for two months. This will get you a total of 80 links (10 articles multiplied by 8 weeks) from ten sites. Some of these articles will be picked up and syndicated on other sites so you'll also see an increase in links from those sources as well. Of course, the ultimate number of links you'll get will correspond directly to how in-demand your articles are.
This is an important point to understand:
One article placed on an article directory can turn into a dozen links (or more) as that article is picked up and reprinted by other sites.
Read the article directories sections of our Advanced Strategies for Building Inbound Links report for more about submitting your articles to article directories.
Again, like regular directories, article directories are easy places to get links from. The ever-so-slight downside of that is the fact that links from article directories can be viewed as less important than links coming from places from which they are traditionally more difficult to obtain—high PageRank sites or .edu domains are examples. But they're still an important part of your overall link building strategy, and they tend to work as a springboard for getting your articles—and thus your links— picked up by all sorts of other sites on the net.
Finding sites to syndicate your articles.
First, as we mentioned, articles you submit to article directories tend to be picked up and reprinted by other sites. Once a site reprints your article, that gives you an opening to contact them, establish a relationship, and offer them more content to reprint.
Using this strategy, you can cultivate a stable of sites that are reprinting your articles and adding links to you on a regular basis. Coupled with submitting to article directories, these relationships make it easy to add dozens of new links to your site every time you release an article.
Second, keep in mind that some of your competitors are also syndicating articles to other sites. If you can find out who is reprinting your competitors' articles, it's an easy task to contact those sites and offer to let them reprint some of your own articles. Searching for the names of people working for your competition is a good way to do this. If they're writing articles, those articles will show up online with the author's name in the signature line.
Another way to learn who's reprinting your competitors' articles is to do a backlink analysis on your competitions' sites. This will show who's linking to them and, by checking those links, you can see if any are coming from syndicated articles. If so, it's reasonable to expect the site that reprinted your competitor's article to also be interested in syndicating your articles as well.
If you just have a few articles being syndicated, then you can track who is reprinting them just by searching for some unique text from the article surrounded by quotes. For example, if this article you're currently reading was being syndicated (it's not) you could find it by searching for the first sentence in Google:
"We've gotten lots of great feedback on our recent series of link-building articles."
However, if you've got a large number of articles being syndicated, we recommend Google Alerts to automate the process of tracking who is reprinting your articles.
Keep in mind that the success you'll have with article syndication is directly related to the quality of the articles you're producing. There's a huge thirst for content from talented writers operating in niche markets. But there's also a glut of content being produced by mediocre writers. That's why we say the ultimate secret to building high-quality links is this: Hire a good writer!
3. Write and distribute a few press releases.
Do you think you need to have earth-shattering news in order to send out a press release? Actually, you don't. There's tons of reasons to submit a press release. Perhaps your company has just released a new product, or won an award, or decided to target a new market. Try browsing the recent press releases over at PRWeb for some ideas.
Even better, hire PRWeb Direct to create, optimize, and distribute the press release for you. Try submitting one press release a month for 2 months. Each press release should net you about a dozen links and often far more depending on how many sites pick up and distribute your release.
4. Buy some links.
If you've been reading our articles and taken our advice about link-building, you've probably discovered that building quality incoming links takes time and effort. The fact is that a huge amount of time can be spent contacting sites and asking for links, submitting your site to directories and writing articles (either for syndication to other sites or to place on your own site to make it more link-worthy). Depending on the scope of your online effort, link building can become a full time job.
Not surprisingly, that's exactly what the search engines want. The more work it takes to rank highly, the harder it is to manipulate the search engine results. Anyone can quickly and easily modify the keyword density on their web pages, but getting good sites to link to you is a whole other story. The good news is, the sites that mount an intelligent and energetic link building campaign are the one's that rank at the top of the search results!
Of course, not everyone has the means to employ a full-time link builder. Sometimes you're looking for the quick and easy solution to a challenging problem. That's where paid links can help.
However, purchasing links is not something to be undertaken without in-depth knowledge regarding the pros, cons, and alternative strategies within this approach. In fact, it's so imperative that you make no mistakes, we've dedicated an entire report to this topic—and you'll find it right here in this month's issue...
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