Effective link building strategies
Like search engine optimization (SEO), link building can be a fairly long-drawn process. However, few businesses or marketers can afford the luxury of moving too slowly with their efforts to build natural search engine traffic.
A very common approach to link building is the traditional means of identifying sites that could be potential “link partners” and approaching them, in return for a link on your own website. This kind of reciprocal link building continues to be in vogue despite several questions over its value to SEO.
Our own view is that reciprocal link building per se is not bad or useless; if the websites that you are getting links from are relevant and of good quality such that they can be deemed useful, then there is no reason for search engines to ignore these links. This view stems from a broader perspective of link building, which you mustn’t forget is ultimately aimed at driving traffic to your website. Therefore, there is certainly a place for reciprocal link building in a SEO campaign, though how it is done and who you obtain the reciprocal links from will dictate how effective (or ) it can prove to be.
The flip side of going for reciprocal link building is the pace at which links are built, which can often be painfully slow, particularly if you are going to apply stringent quality criteria (which as we continuously reiterate, you must).
Therefore, the course is to adopt strategies that can result in inbound links more quickly while being ethical and legitimate, or in SEO parlance, “white hat”. We detail below some of the strategies that we apply successfully to our link building and SEO campaigns.
Directory listings
Get your website listed in as many good directories as you can. Directory listings have proven to be extremely effective in building up one-way inbound links reasonably quickly.
The value of a listing from a good directory is the extremely well structured manner in which the listings are organized in relevant categories. Therefore, even if you are getting a link from a general purpose directory, the fact that you would be obtaining it from a “good neighborhood” of other websites in your own domain or category is certainly helpful.
In fact, Google has also recommended inclusion in some good directories such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ (Open Directory Project) in its webmaster guidelines.
Most good web directories charge a fee for inclusion: for example, Yahoo! Directory charges an annual listing fee of US$299/-. However, if you are serious about achieving high search engine rankings, allocating a certain budget for paid inclusion in top directories is extremely prudent.
There has been a proliferation of web directories, which does pose a risk of search engines beginning to ignore these links. This is where professional search engine marketing firms- with their existing knowledge base, research back-up and proprietary tools- can help in weeding out link farms masquerading as directories.
Press release syndication
Online press release distribution or syndication has not only led to greater synergies between press relations and marketing but also become a vital cog in the search engine marketing plan.
Here’s why press releases are so important for link building: well-written, timely, topical news releases will have your organization written about by countless people, be they mainstream media or the new army of bloggers that marketers can ill-afford to ignore. When the media write about your company, more often than not, you are likely to get an inbound link to your website. Now imagine the value of a link from a top rated publication - it can do wonders to your link popularity as well as traffic.
There are a number of very good press release syndication services (PRWeb, PRLeap, i-Newswire, 27-7pressreleasenetwork, BusinessWire, PRNewswire, to name a few), many of which allow you to submit and distribute press releases for free (with caveats, of course). However, by paying certain fees, you can multiply the visibility your press release will receive and increase your chances of building more inbound links. Not only that, feeds from these distribution sites are indexed by services such as Google News and Yahoo News and show up almost immediately in their results.
Article marketing & syndication
There are two aspects to this approach. The first one, which could in fact be considered very much a part of PR strategy, is to write articles and get published by well known publications/ websites in your company’s niche. Not only will this give you a link back to your website from an “authority” site, but also provide considerable visibility and mileage to the individual as well as the organization. Of course, this approach takes effort in both producing high quality articles as well as pitching the articles to editors and getting them published. However, their value is immense in organic search engine marketing.
The second approach of article syndication involves submitting articles to article directories and leveraging their distribution capabilities. Content published on some of the well known article directory sites (eg. GoArticles.com, eZineArticles.com, iSnare.com) are picked up and republished by other publishers who are looking for free-to-use content for their own websites. Since these publishers are contractually bound to retain the “resource box”, which has the article by-line and attribution typically with links pointing to your website, you get multiple links from diverse sources.
Link building with forums & blogs
This strategy is certainly not without its doubters and skeptics, mainly because of unethical spammers who have shamelessly used forums and blogs to post links to their sites (”comment spam”). However, if you were to participate on blog posts and forum threads to genuinely contribute to the discussion and add value, nobody is going to grudge you “link love”.
There is certainly no shame in aspiring to get inbound links; but the key is to give back something of value to the blog or forum. Professional search engine marketers realize that this is no mechanical task; it requires a fair degree of intelligence and ability to analyse and comprehend the issue at hand and then articulating one’s own views that contribute to the discussion. Therefore, they do this sparingly and intelligently, knowing fully well that they could either build a name for themselves or their clients by doing this well or be ignored as a spammer by users of these forums and the search engines. It pays to realize that there is much more at stake than a mere link.
This is good stuff man!