LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES It is common knowledge that inbound links to your site are very important. First, high quality links will bring you a great deal of visitor traffic. Moreover, they can greatly influence your ranking although the weight of reciprocal and one-way links is somewhat different. One-way links, or non-reciprocal links are the most profitable and at the same time the most difficult to obtain. One-way links have some advantages if compared to reciprocal links: they carry more weight with search engines, plus you don't have to monitor them as carefully as reciprocal links (some dishonest webmasters may use Black Hat techniques to hide a supposedly reciprocal link to your site from search engines). Reciprocal links are not as bad as some people think. If a link exchange is made between sites sharing similar topics, the exchange is beneficial to both sites. This is actually the best type of acquiring reciprocal links. You should avoid exchanging links with sites that are not relevant to the theme of your site. So the question comes up how to get links? See below a list of SEO-savvy methods that webmasters and site owners can use to get links. START FROM CONTENT The first and the most perfect way is to write unique and really valuable content. You'll be gratified when some webmaster links to you just because you provide useful or interesting information. A high-quality and regularly updated site will naturally be linked to. OLD BUT EFFECTIVE METHODS LINKS FROM DIRECTORIES It is easy to get inbound links from good directories but it might cost some money. More valuable links are from first-level directories such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Yahoo! Directory offers guaranteed review in 7 days for $299 and with DMOZ one waits for months to be listed (if a volunteer editor doesn't reject your site). For this approach there are a lot of other secondary and topic-specific directories. Note that, since the year of 2007, most link directories lost their value for linking to other websites and search engines (especially Google) no longer consider low quality directory links. So make sure to check the quality of a potential link from a directory before you go for a directory listing.
LINK EXCHANGE Link exchange is an old yet effective method of acquiring two-way links, as it may help you improve the PageRank of a page that is linked to and raise your site link popularity. The best thing about link exchange is that you can quickly get a lot of links pointing to your site. As a result, this can help you improve your PR, site link popularity and site visitor traffic. But don't be too aggressive when exchanging links: SEs may frown upon a thousand links acquired within a couple of days, and devalue them all. Also, make sure not to place more than 100 links on one page of your directory (see Google Webmaster Guidelines for more details). Instead, split your directory into several pages. Otherwise it may be considered a link farm by search engines. This may affect your rankings and webmasters that are aware of the issue will not want to exchange links with you. Do a search on your targeted keywords in targeted search engines like Google. See whose pages are ranking high. Consider if it's possible to get a link from these top sites. For sites that do seem like viable candidates, check to see if they meet the following criteria: 1. The content must be relevant to yours. 2. They must be open for link exchange possibilities. For instance, you see other sites' banners or links posted or you find the site has its own link directory. 3. They must correspond to your requirements in terms of PageRank (not obligatory) and traffic rank (much more important). You can measure the traffic rank of the site with the help of Alexa toolbar (www.alexa.com) and PR with the help of Google toolbar. If a site has a lot of traffic, it is likely a valuable source of traffic for you. 4. The webmaster's or other contact's e-mail address must be available to send your link exchange proposition. Another place to look for related sites is directories. Go to directories like Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ or the many smaller directories found on the Web to find categories related to your topic and keywords. Yet another place to look for potential link partners is the lists of sites that link to your competitors or to sites ranked high for your keywords. Such lists may be created with the help of Web CEO's Link Analyzer by using the "Who links to me" analysis of your competitor's page or other high ranking, a keyword related page or Web CEO's special tool called Partner Finder. Web CEO offers an easy and handy e-mail preferences tab and other services to manage correspondence with potential partners in a Partner Finder tool.
ARTICLE/PRESS RELEASE WRITING One more way is to write an article and then publish it. It is very time consuming as you have to write it, optimize it (a well optimized article gives more weight to targeted keywords as this increases relevance and thus raises the weight of the link) and finding a site to submit to. It is, however, worth it despite all these difficulties as articles provide valuable and entirely relevant links, moreover it can bring highly targeted traffic. Another tactic is to create press releases. Most press release Web services allow users to subscribe to subjects they are interested in. There is a good chance that your press release will be brought to a potential client. The service is hardly free but it will be cheaper than paid links. Press releases, unlike articles, are targeted for a special audience and they mainly distribute news to news people. We give detailed lessons on article/press release writing with numerous tips and guidelines in the Professional course of Web CEO University. You'll be able to choose the leading online news and press release distribution services or article directories via our lessons or via the Web CEO Submission Tool. CONTEMPORARY METHODS AND TRENDS LINK BAITING Site owners should be aware of this progressive technique which is very effective if used skillfully. Link baiting is a new method of getting popularity and links by means of writing an article, posts or using other online promotional methods to make waves within your industry. Social media promotional methods are similar (you hope your Twitter Tweets will be found via real-time search resulting in Retweets (RTs) and Follows. The main idea is to give people a topic to talk about that is interesting and controversial. They will spread it and link to it while displaying interest or recommending it to others. VIRAL CONTENT DISTRIBUTION Link baiting is applicable for a wide range of fields. Experienced marketers and online entrepreneurs use this concept to create the content, blog posts and forums posts that people want to link their websites to.
As you can see it should be content of a viral nature that people actually want to publish their thoughts about. You have to start with something interesting, well researched or unique. After your work is ready, submit it to sites and places where web surfers can see it and republish or set a link to. Social media channels are a great place to do this. Social media channels include blogging systems, blog search engines and blog syndication websites, RSS readers and numerous social sites like: a) social bookmarking sites b) social news sites c) social event sharing sites d) photo and video sharing sites and others. Please refer to the "Social Media Marketing" lesson of our Professional training course to learn more about each type of content promotion using social media channels. Blogs and forums gather large numbers of readers creating specific audiences where you can successfully provide your advice, instructions and stories or simply answer questions. All these actions may be useful to get links back to your site from the forum threads, hot blog discussions, etc. WIDGETS DISTRIBUTION Apart from content writing and submitting you can offer useful tools and widgets. Video, tools, widgets uploading could bring you additional traffic from both YouTube.com and the Google search engine. The main idea here is to use the link baiting principle when people are interested and help you with the unique offer distribution. They can link to it recommending to others or you can put the link inside the offer to harvest the results after distribution. Creating programs and tools demands special skills and knowledge but can help you immensely with inbound non-reciprocal links. When a person uses your piece of work for an online activity or something else, he/she helps your website with a vote via the link included. You can share your widgets with hyperlinks from the websites of your own, partners' networks, social sites, blogs and forums.
LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES TO AVOID LINK BUYING Link buying is a border technique which should be treated carefully. Note: It is an illegal link building method if used for site optimization and search engines' crawlers can follow them. It is known as a black hat spamming method and can be strictly punished. More about spamming linking can be found in our "Techniques to Avoid or Use at Your Own Risk (Search Engine Spamming)" section. The way you can use link buying legally is for advertising purposes. When you buy an advertisement, listing in the pay-per-click programs or other search engines advertising products you also get a link back to your site. However, search engines guidelines strictly demand to close such links from the crawlers by the rel="nofollow" attribute. MANIPULATIVE LINK SCHEMES The next offensive technique search engines struggle with is artificial link schemes which are made for manipulative purposes. There are special tricky schemes of linking between a group of sites to cheat the search engine indexing mechanisms. We steadily don t recommend using such link schemes as they are strictly prohibited and lead to penalties or loss of rankings. LINKS FROM OFF-TOPIC RESOURCES We'll repeat that inbound, non-reciprocal links are most profitable. But to get the best of them you should choose the websites very carefully to get only relevant ones. Search engines have become more and more intelligent; they check everything about/around the link the content on the page, keywords in the anchor text, number of links on the page and so on. So any off-topic sites or widgets will be analyzed and won't add value for you if they re found wanting. Moreover if you get links or cross change links with an irrelevant site this may be seen as a border-line Black hat technique. Depending on the off-topic links number it will be seen as Gray or Black hat exchange and can be penalized at any time. SUMMARY 1. Inbound non-reciprocal links can raise your rank noticeably. Major tactics are as follows: display unique valuable content on your site that attracts others in your industry to link to you unilaterally, write and submit articles and press releases, get
links from related sites, create viral link-worthy content and distribute it on the Web using social media and other channels for spreading the word. 2. Although link exchange is considered an outdated method of raising your link popularity, you can use it in combination with other link building methods. Note however that you should avoid link exchange with link farms. 3. Creating video files, tools and widgets that people want to link their websites to is a powerful and effective method to get links and bring more traffic to your site. 4. Don't participate in manipulative link schemes that are prohibited by the search engines' guidelines. Inbound links or cross change links with a site about a topic other than yours can be seen by SEs as a Black hat technique and may be penalized at any time.