12 Essentials for Building Inbound Links to Your SiteGetting other sites to point to you yields dividends. Not only do you get traffic from those links, you also come up higher in search results when those sites linking to you are relevant and of high quality. We came up with over 53 ways to get other sites to link to you. Out of those 53, we pared it down to the very best tactics. Those 12 tactics and tools are below. 1. Widget LinkingCreate a useful widget, which is an applet or tool that performs some kind of task or function, and embed your site's link in it. Offer it to the public at no charge, and hundreds or even thousands of sites may pick it up and put it to use on their sites. This tactic was employed with enormous success by Lee Odden of SEO/SEM consulting firm TopRank Online Marketing and the highly influential Online Marketing Blog. He created two widgets: an RSS Button Maker and a Social Bookmarks Creator. Both are quite handy tools that streamline their respective processes.
At the time of writing, these tools were in use by over 80,000 blogs, many of which link back to his blog because of the link to his site embedded into the code. As a matter of fact, Yahoo! Site Explorer reported 408,593 inbound links to his 2 1/2 year old blog. We are deeply jealous. BTW, you can have a developer create your widget or you can explore one of the many widget creation-enabling sites out there like yourminis.com. Just make sure a link back to your site is embedded into the code. 2. Content Keyword Tagging"Tagging" is the process of assigning keywords to content or to bookmarks as a means to classify and organize information in a way that makes sense to the user. You can assign keyword tags to your own blog posts and RSS feeds and even to the content on your website. By assigning these keyword tags, you make it easier for search engines and people to understand how you've organized your information and in what categories. Likewise, with the use of a tagging/bookmarking tool, site visitors can bookmark any content and tag it with the keywords of their choice. So, for example, a social media site can be searched or navigated via a keyword tag to find others who share the same interests and to see the content or sites they've bookmarked as good resources worth a return visit. People can also be notified when new RSS feeds with their chosen tags have been published. The challenge is that there is no standard tag or social bookmarking protocol, so you have many tools and endless tags in use. Who wants to tag things of interest site by site and then revisit each individual site to remember what they've tagged as useful? No one, which means bookmarking tools such as AddThis have been created that allow content publishers (such as blog owners) to offer an all-in-one checklist of possible bookmarking tool targets to visitors. Do note that tags and bookmarking options can be attached to any content on your site, whether you use the AddThis or go about it another way. That even includes your PDFs and press releases. Social media participants can also arm themselves with a multi-tagging, bookmarking and organizational tool such as OnlyWire or Flock, which is a Web browser with social media functionality built right in. So, for example, when this particular review gets posted to the Web Digest For Marketers website, we could, should and eventually will tag it at the bottom with relevant keywords and offer shortcuts to the most popular bookmarking tools. Visitors who want to quickly find this review again can tag it, organize it and store it by keyword in their browser/tool, on their desktop or elsewhere for future reference. 3. Social Media LinkingYou've heard all about Digg and Del.icio.us and may even be participating in these social media networks to promote your site. The problem with some of the social media big guns is you must evaluate who is using these sites, whether or not they are your target audience and therefore whether or not a time-intensive social media strategy will pay off for you. There is another option, however, and that is tapping into one of the growing number of niche social media sites instead. For example, ThisNext is a shopping recommendation site for products of all kinds. It's driven by visitor recommendations, each of whom tag their favorite products with various keywords so that others with the same interests can find them. So, for example, if your company has a product to market you can set up your own ThisNext account, pick a few of your products, tag them, throw in your company URL and then hook up with others who share your tags. As long as you are providing good information (as opposed to self promotion) this is a viable strategy. Other examples of topical social sites are DealBundle, wherein users collaborate on finding the best deals by store or product, and fashion-specific social shopping site StyleHive. 4. Mapping Link Hubs and Tag NeighborhoodsFind like sites and topical link hubs and you've found sites that are highly likely to link to yours. Tools that help you identify these sites are Similicio.us, which is a search engine that finds relevant websites based on people's tags on del.icio.us. It answers the question "What sites did people who tagged this site also tag?". You can find link hubs by listing your site and up to nine competitor sites in this Link Authority Tool. It will serve up a list of sites that are linking to a good percentage of the sites you've entered. For example, if you put in the URL of your site and the URLs of nine competitors, it will serve up a list of those sites linking to at least half of your list of ten. So what's actionable here? If a site is linking a number of your competitors, it's probably relevant to your site, too. The thing to do is contact those sites pointing to the competition and not you and try to get them to link to you too. (Note - you must have a Google API License to use this popular tool.) Yet another option is to use a visual search engine such as Quintura and conduct a search either by topical keyword or by using your own site as the starting point. It will show you which sites are most closely related to yours in terms of content/keywords according to Google or the search engine of your choice. 5. PDF LinkingIf you publish PDF whitepapers or other kinds of PDFs with tools, graphics or content within, anyone that downloads and saves your PDF virtually has your company right on his or her desktop, or at least attached to your email within the IN box. Obviously your PDF will have visible, direct links back to your website. In addition, if you embed metatags into your PDF (which are not visible to the reader), when a search engine spiders your site and takes a look at your content, it can read the metatags behind the scenes and thus will add your PDF to its database. If someone is on the hunt for topical PDF whitepapers, for example, they can of course query Google or any other search engine directly and you do want yours to show up. But you also want your PDF whitepaper to show up when someone is merely conducting a topical search, learn how to populate your whitepapers with relevant keywords behind the scenes. Two useful guides to this tactic are offered at Small Business SEM and directly on the Adobe Acrobat website. 6. Blog OptimizationThere's no sense in devoting time and effort to publishing a blog if you don't do it well and make it as effective a marketing tool as possible. Stephan Spencer, who is the founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts, demonstrates his mastery of blogging for marketing purposes by publishing a valuable and very informative blog called Stephan Spencer's Scatterings. It covers the topics of blogging, search engine optimization, email marketing and the like based on his insider and learned point of view. There is much to learn from the blog content itself. Given the nature of this business, he is proving by example that he can walk the walk, not just talk the talk. So very often we go to sites of SEO companies that ask to be reviewed by us only to find they have minimal inbound links and an Alexa rating in the hundreds of thousands or higher. At the time of writing, Google reported that Stephan's blog had 896 inbound links and Yahoo! reported 23,652. To improve your blog performance you can also review the How Linkable? tool. It was created by Google Blogoscoped founder Philipp Lenssen, who reviews dozens of potential links every day for his popular blog. He makes split-second decisions on whether or not a blog post is worth his time or a link. This tool categorizes the explicit and implicit factors he considers via a list of checkboxes. Take the test and you will receive an analysis of how linkable your blog posts are with suggestions for improvement. BTW, don't forget to comment on other blogs and include a link back to your site. And don't forget to submit your blog to the growing list of blog-specific search engines and directories. Many people (including this editor) use them to find blogs without having to wade through the morass of results you get at a general search engine. You won't be surprised to learn that Google offers a blog-specific search engine. Another example is the business blog directory at the Best of the Web site. 7. Link AnalyticsThere are hundreds of tools out there that allow you analyze and assess your link building efforts and tactics. This site offers a directory to 136 of the most popular ones. Useful tools to be aware of are those that enable you to:
8. Press Release OptimizationPress releases, when done well and picked up by news search engines and other sites, will generate inbound links to your site. News wire services and search engines evaluate each individual press release and categorize it according to the keywords found in that item so that new junkies can get recent and relevant results. That's why your press releases need to be packed with relevant keywords, ie., optimized for news and search engines. You can do this yourself, of course, or you can use a firm devoted solely to the SEO of press releases like Newsforce, which offers a series of tools to use after you post the actual content of your release into their system. Those tools include a keyword research tool, a press release SEO tool, a link building tool and follow-up reports on how your release was ranked by news search engines. You submit your release through your choice of wire services and use this service or one like it solely for optimizing your release. 9. Content RepurposingYou've written or paid to have someone write content for you, so you might as well get as much as you can out of your investment by repurposing it. You can submit your content to an article bank, where other sites can pick up your articles or tip lists or what have you and link to them or publish them on their sites. Companies that offer a directory of already published content include Ezine Articles, Go Articles and iSnare.com. You'll want to find out whether your content will live solely on the article bank's site or whether those who pick it up can publish it directly on their sites. If they do so, keep in mind you do lose control of where your content appears and that may have branding implications. But hey, isn't the same true of RSS feeds? If you or someone on your staff is a prolific writer, you may also want to get a gig publishing regularly to an industry publication or by publishing regularly to a content site where user-contributed articles are welcome, such as Topix Business News or Newsvine. 10. Paid LinksRemember paid inclusion? It started a few years back and involved paying for inclusion in big directory sites like Yahoo or Business.com. Many of these sites ask you to pay by the page for your appearance (not just a one-time fee for the entire site). Managing which of your pages have been indexed on which sites can get tedious if you do it manually. That's why there are tools that can manage, track and report on the effectiveness of all the specific pages you've paid directories to list. A couple such services are Quigo and PositionTech, which has been around for years. 11. Content SyndicationMost people talk about RSS usage as it relates to the end user and how many people are reading RSS feeds without realizing that what they're doing is in fact reading an RSS feed. In fact, they don't need to know as long as they're getting the content they want. What is less discussed, in our view, is how RSS serves that other audience, namely, other websites. For those of you who know this, stop reading now. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) lets other websites pick up your content and embedded links. Zillions of websites out there are always on the prowl to republish RSS feeds containing high-quality content germane to their audience. Typically blogging tools have RSS feed capabilities baked right in to the application. If you want to bone up on how RSS and RSS feeds work, go to RSS Specifications. If you want to publish RSS feeds or carry them on your site, companies like RapidFeeds offer tools for both sides of this equation. If you want to find RSS feeds or list yours in an RSS directory so others can find you, two to check out are RSSTop55 and the list at RSS Specifications. If you want a tool that will notify RSS distributors when you have new content, which is called "pinging", you can use Pingomatic. 12. Link Insider ToolsSure, you can get a down and dirty thumbnail idea of who's linking to you by searching Google or Yahoo using the command link://yourdomainname.com. For those of you who don't know, you can get a much more comprehensive list of inbound links at Google or Yahoo! when you use the tools at Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer. |
