Reciprocal Links – The oldest form of link building methods is just to contact another web site and try and get them to link to yours and anyone who was a web site which received a reasonable amount of traffic, will be familiar with these types of requests. If you are going to use this method, it is best if you can think of a way to display these links in an interesting way and something that is imaginative. If it is possible to trade articles and testimonials about each other, it will add to the link quality as opposed to lots of links on a page with no content. If you want to set up a reciprocal link, you will have to justify the reasons why they will want to link to you and it would be beneficial to see if there is anything on your site which may be of interest to them. You could also visit their site and see if there is anything that you might be able to compliment, or try putting a link to your site to theirs and show it to them. It is important not to mention anything about PageRank or search engine rankings as they will probably not reply.
One Way Links – Instead of trying to set up a two way link, you could always try and get someone to only link you. This is obviously going to be a lot more difficult to do and it will take something special to convince them that there is a benefit for adding the link to their site. If your site is one that is purely commercial, then there is not really much point in trying to gain links in this manner as you will need some content which will interest the person or company enough to show it on their site. If you have something you think they might link to, see if you can find similar products and who is linking them.
Bookmarking – A good way of gaining a number of return visitors is by adding a bookmark button so it easy for people to save the site, as a visitor might have forgotten the details. If they cannot remember your site, then there is not much chance that they will link to it. Do not add too many buttons but add them to pages which you think will be looked at again.
Directories – You may wish to add your website onto a directory and this is another SEO trick. It is very easy to do and does not take a lot of time. The only directory that probably is important is DMOZ and is the directory which will provide you with the best link, and it is also free. There is also the benefit that DMOZ is also reproduced on a number of sites and so one link on DMOZ will probably gain you a lot more. Unfortunately it can take a long time to get listed on DMOZ and your best course of action probably is to submit your site every week until they accept you.
There are sole links namely SEO gurus whose building methods are to send sites to both paid and free directories. This method does not achieve the highest ranking for you, and can cost a few thousand pounds. We would therefore recommend that your money be spent elsewhere. There may also be a specialist directory for your industry as well as DMOZ and general ones which can be found by doing a Google ‘keyword submit site’ or ‘keyword directory’. It is advisable if you are going to pay for such a directory listing, that you avoid paying anything more than a few notes, and certainly don’t waste any time for ones which have no web presence.
Friends – It can be a great help if any of your friends have websites of their own, as you could always try to blag a link from them and can even place a link to their website on yours. There’s plenty of bonuses having friends with websites or blogs as it is most likely they will give you freedom to do what you want enabling you to choose your link text
Testimonials – Construct a list of all the companies you use as well as all the products, and try and see if any of them have a testimonials page. If they do, you can send them a testimonial which will include a hyperlink to your own website. Some companies believe that your intentions are to assist them in helping them, when in fact, you are merely after a good link! Should a certain company you are targeting not have a testimonials page still go ahead and send them one of yours. You may find that they put it on their own news section, or better still, their homepage. There is also nothing to stop you submitting your testimonial to companies that you are not familiar with.
Blogs – One of the largest aids in search engine optimisation is better known as ‘Blogs’ which have created a whole industry of marketing in their own right. Both Microsoft and Cnet have given their own staff blogs encompassing the power that it created and resulted in an enormous number of incoming links. Many blogs on the internet are full of information which is packed with information which is only of interest to a select few. However, if you believe that you are confident enough to write articles regarding your industry which will prove both informative and useful, it may be beneficial to attach your own blog to your site. Maybe get your own staff to assist in raising your company’s web presence by getting them to participate in creating their own interesting content which you can incorporate.
However, creating even a quality blog may still not be enough, but would be dependant on the volume and type of traffic to your website. By visiting blogs of a similar nature to your own, you can make your blog work for your site by building a community around it and posting quality comments. That way, there would be more likelihood of getting people over to your website. In order to quickly create incoming links, you should ensure that your blog has a commentary, freebies and lots of interesting articles to hold the reader’s interest. The more quality content you have, the more you will get back and you will be rewarded with your blog doing the links for you.
Writing Articles – Similar to writing a blog which is basically covered in the above section. However, you can obtain extra link credit by getting your articles across to a wide range of industry websites. Web and SEO especially have websites entirely devoted to user-submitted articles alone and as well as that, there are also vast numbers of general article directories. An example of one of the best is ‘Buzzle’ (www.buzzle.com). The most important thing to remember is that quality really does count.
Distributing Geekery – Creating a nice piece of web geekery is a great idea if you’re used to spending a great deal of your time inside text editor. JavaScript is the best choice to create a bit of programming in, and offers free distribution. It’s amazing how many web people don’t know JavaScript, but they are still able to pull together a script and add a few HTML attributes. However, the success of the lightbox script (www.digitalia.be/software/slimbox) is due to its simplicity of installation. Even if you are able to create a large piece of JavaScript, it is no guarantee, no matter how good it is, that you will probably only get links from the some of the most hardened web geeks. Ultimately, server-side language and developing something within this, will probably be unlikely to bring in traffic as your intentions to impress will be considerably reduced. A great library can be made with phpThumb (www.phpthumb.sourceforge.net), or even a full-blown PHP framework, but would need quite a significant amount of input. An alternative would be to try HTML and CSS community. You will find that the Markup and stylesheet languages far easier than the likes of JavaScript and PHP, enabling far more people to produce them. If you are able to put together an article to an authority site such as A List Apart (www.alistapart.com), you could get some good linkage. This would need you to present an article about a fancy use of CSS, or even try and document one of the many undocumented Internet Explorer bugs – such as new ones in IE7.
Another method of link building is better known as ‘icon design’. One of the most impressive ‘linked to free icon set’ is famfamfam’s silk icon set (www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk). If you visit this domain, you will find something like 600,000+ links with a PageRank of 7/8. There are more links here and a better web presence than many international corporations, and has spent thousands on SEO just by creating a set of 700 free icons. It is more than likely you will get more easy links manually and by simply posting a quality icon round the net than most other methods.
Free Designs – There are a large number of sites where you can post your design templates, when distributing free web designs. Open Design Community (www.opendesigns.org) is a good place to visit. If you ensure that you retain the high quality and establish a section on your site for free design, you should succeed in getting a few links. Providing free blog templates doesn’t have as much potential compared to distributing programming or web icons, but as long as you’re a good all-round web design company, there’s every chance you have a file full of unused designs which you can use.
Provide Content Not Available Online – A great way of creating traffic is by creating a subscription website simply containing lots of content which was otherwise unavailable elsewhere and contained a complete index of contents indexed by search engines. Even with a few incoming links, the site can get a fair amount of traffic because of the information not being available elsewhere and consequently, subscriptions will be forthcoming. Historical documents can contain the best content such as rare genealogy almanacs. In conjunction with this, any information on countries which are not as well documented online as well as pre-European African histories. Online genealogical and historical communities will be attracted to the information and can also create quite a link trail. Included in this synopsis could be simply by creating a company history if yours has been established for a long period of time. Include details of founders and highlight genealogical information as well if you have this to hand.
Pay Per Click – If you are loathe to pay an SEO and you can’t get your website to rank by yourself, maybe try a ‘pay per click’ (PPC) campaign. Though this method you will also be able to investigate as to whether a certain keyword is worth optimising. Invariably, the people that find you via PCC may well link to your site and end up ranking as long as you have a high quality website.
Press Releases – These have been known to take a long time to set up, and produce little results, so in hindsight, it’s probably best to avoid them. The only way these would be successful is if the news was a major event or even headline news. Submitting endless press releases just advertising what service you offer really wouldn’t produce results. You can submit press releases for free online in many places. Submitting press releases to national journalists, local newspapers and news agencies are the best way forward and submitting to journalists covering your field as well as specialist publications will produce the finest results for your industry.
Social Bookmaking – There are many of these sites around today including Digg (www.com) and del.icio.us (www.del.icio.us), and you should submit to these sites and get your friends to add to them also. It is never worth submitting low quality information as this will only be of interest to a select few. So, if you post articles on your site or you have a blog, do consider the addition of submit buttons for all the social bookmaking sites.
Government and Educational Links – Educational and Government links (.gov / .edu or .ac) are all considered to have authority and trustworthiness in search engines. However, it isn’t unusual for some types of industries to find it harder than others to obtain links on governmental sites.
Taking the time to look at your local government sites will show you whether they have a section relating to your particular industry. If you try, you may well be able to convince them to give you a link and it is possible that they will have a local business directory also.
Trade and Professional Organisations – These tend to have topical authority and invariably have good rankings. If there are any trade or professional organisations who you are a member of, visit their site and check whether they have a directory of members in order for you to obtain a listing.
Affiliates – Online business can be increased enormously by affiliates programs, invariably people just trying to make a living with considerably smaller websites and blogs. They can usually display your advert for free as this could well bring them a little extra and would normally be related to your industry – thus creating traffic which is targeted. Unfortunately, the downside of affiliates programs is that they don’t provide any search engine value because the affiliate links have to pass to your site where the traffic originates from. Affiliate links will usually be displayed as http://www.mutinydesign.co.uk?aff=123aff.
There are two methods which you can use to avoid this: |
