Index:
Article Maketing - Directory Submissions - Viral Tool Development - Press Releases - Link exchange - Template Design/Free Templates - Blogging - Forums Postings - Online Tools - Viral/ Social Bookmarking Viral Link Building
One of the best strategies to get on top of search engines either in Canada the USA or world wide is link building and inbound link acquisition either one way or reciprocal But what does link building actually entail? It simply is a voting algorithm created by Google in the early 2000 to use the votes of other websites to your website as a way to increase your search engine rankings, mostly for Google but these days, Bing and Yahoo have also adopted similar algorithms. So the question is, how do you get links to your website?
Ten methods are proven to be the most effective, they are article marketing, directory submissions, viral tool development, press releases, link exchanges, template design and replication, blogging, forums posting, online tools and viral/social marketing. Some of these can be done by amateurs and some require the help of professionals, results will vary but applying these 10 link building strategies will give you a strong competitive edge over other business owners in your related respective industries. One thing however must be taken into consideration and that is how quickly can you achieve this without triggering red flags for search engines...so it is important to build you links slowly but with regularity. 100 inbound links per month is the average accepted number. These days online SEO is not nearly as effective as it used to be and using these strategies will definitely give your website a boost in search engine rankings including Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This consists in writing articles and submitting them to either article directories or content providers. You can them append your signature at the end of the article often called bio, author's box or resources. Some article directories or content providers might even let you embed links right into the article body although this is getting more an more rare due to the abuse of article spammers. While this might seem to be a fairly simple link building strategy it is actually very time consuming and tedious because multiple parameters are involved. Will your article get approved, will your article get published? Will your article be even indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and major search engines? How many article to submit per article directories? Does the article directory apply the no-follow attribute to your links (for that reason it is very, very important to use some webmaster tools to be able to view the code on the fly to make sure that the blog really IS do follow.) Does the article directory use the no-index no follow in their robot.txt files(even if the link is dofollow, some webmasters create a robot file that will tell Google and major search engines to not even index your article...the effect of this is the same as the no-follow tag)? For that reason it is better to either hire a professional to take care of your article marketing efforts or do it yourself albeit very time consuming than hire an amateur SEO article marketer, one wrong step and he could easily do your website more harm than good.
This link building strategy consists in submitting your website to both human and automated website directories, they are just like the yellow pages phone book but instead of commanding outrageous monthly and yearly fees and dues they are free to submit to, most of them anyways. The ones that charge a fee are usually not to be trusted unless you are an experienced SEO/SEM online marketing expert with web design experience that is knowledgeable enough to tell the good directories from the bad ones. But still some tools are available to choose what directories to submit your site to and witch ones to avoid. Common tools included but are not limited to the Firefox no follow extension, Alexa Tool Bar and Google toolbar. Some are link farms and could possibly hurt your website so one must be very careful to what directories to submit the site. For that reason it is usually advisable to stay away from automated directory submission services and automated schemes. Best to submit one by one after careful evaluation of the website directory's reputation and credibility. Some very safe directories to submit to are the ones that are approved by DMOZ, this means that they are also backed by Google. While they are safe to submit to some very strict submission guidelines must be met and applying the wrong way could get your site banned for re-submitting again for months or even years. So then again, it is recommended to use the services of a human directories submission expert to take care of this very delicate link building strategy.
What does a virus do? It replicates itself. In the online marketing world this can be both harmful or beneficial depending on how it's exploited. Some malevolent webmasters can use this to cause havoc but we will talk about ways to make this beneficial to your website and to end users. Tool building consists of design software that is so good that it will make webmasters want to link to you. While these tools might not be of any use to the general population and amateur bloggers, they will greatly help webmasters, IT professionals, graphic designers, internet marketers, SEO experts, SEM consultants, professional web designers and the list goes on. Unlike online tool development that we will look at in tip number 9, these applications are meant to be used offline. The internet professionals, engineers, software developers, technology experts among others can then use your tool at will and if impressed by the functionality of the tool, link on his site as a resource to your site. Obviously this link building strategy requires the help of a web development
firm or individual freelancer or contractor. While this might not be the most economical link building method out there is can certainly be one of the most effective. This is the kind of link building effort than can reap rewards for years if not decade if you keep upgrading the software/tool and updating it on a regular basis, either monthly, quarterly of even yearly although quarterly is usually seen a sufficient.
Just like in the offline world, a solid press release can bring free publicity for your website. And instead of having calls and faxes sent to you, people and professionals will visit your website. If they like what they see they might link to you. Numerous press release websites are out there, some paid and some free. A paying press release site will not necessarily offer advantages over a free one as most press release sites are often paid for by advertising revenues (Google Ad-sense is common) so you are not required to pay as an end user. Some free press release websites also have more traffic since they are populated with more releases than paying sites, this attracts in turn more traffic and publicity.
The advantage of press releases is the sudden surge of traffic you will get depending on the industry you are in. It is very important that your website is ready before creating your press release. Doing it the wrong way could cause more harm than good to your brand and image, especially if you have long term goals for your website/business. It is always best to hire professional press release writers in conjunction with SEO experts and link building strategies webmasters to make sure everything is done right. However, a lot of resource out there are available to teach you how to write your own press release, this might also be effective but you really need to make sure that everything is done absolutely perfectly and filled out exactly as the editors what it, otherwise your press release might get rejected.
This is also know as reciprocal link exchange. It consists in having webmasters exchange links to and from their respective web sites. Does this still work? Some webmasters claim it does and some others say otherwise. This debate is as old as the internet and has been going on for over a decade, with the recent change in Google algorithms it is even harder to gauge and quantify the effectiveness of link exchanges. If the website exchanging links with you has a good Google page rank, seniority, reputation and credibility it can sometimes help. But you must be able to know what site is a good link exchange partner and what sites aren't. For this tools are needed like the Alexa toolbar to measure traffic rank and the Google toolbar to measure page rank. The higher the figures where the reciprocal link to your website is the more beneficial it will be. It all depends on the industry compatibility of the link exchange site partners and even specific link exchange URL (web page). For a link exchange to be effective it has to be done with very specific parameters. The page rank (Google algorithm that determines the “value” of inbound links of his links page to yours and vice versa can make a huge difference, if the other webmaster is unaware of these specifics, it could be advantageous for you to exchange links with his site(page) if his page rank is in your favor (superior to the reciprocating link to him from your site).
This link building strategy is similar to the offline tools development and online tool building for webmasters and internet industry pros. The idea is to create a template that will be used by numerous webmasters that are not willing to develop/create their own design, could be a lack of time, commitment,experience, competence, or expertise. Either way, they need a template for their project be it for a website, or any kind of online development, the key here is to append a link to your site as the creator of the template in question. As most effective link building strategies, it requires the help of a professional web developer.
This can be achieved by developing templates for a multitude of CMS platforms like AdaptCMS Lite, ATutor, b2evolution, BEdita, BLOG:CMS, CivicSpace, CMS Made Simple, Concrete5, Dotclear, Drupal, DynPG, e107, Exponent CMS, eZ Publish, Frog CMS, Gamboo Web Suite, ImpressCMS, Joomla!, Habari, KnowledgeTree, Document Management System, Lyceum, Mambo, Merlintalk, MiaCMS, Midgard CMS, MODx, MySource Matrix (Squiz), Nucleus, CMS, Ocportal, Opus, PHP-Fusion, PHP-Nuke, PHPSlash, phpWebSite, Pixie (CMS), RavenNuke CMS, Serendipity, SilverStripe, SPIP, TangoCMS, Textpattern, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Tribiq CMS, TYPO3, whCMS, webSPELL, WordPress,Website Baker, Xaraya, XOOPS, Zikula are the most popular ones. Free Joomla templates, free Wordpress Templates and Drupal Templates are the most popular.
If your template is good it will be used over a vast platform of online content management systems and give you a lot of backlincks from a variety of servers. This is a lot of work by any experimented webmaster or can be very costly if the work has to financed for by your business but the results can be some of the best of the linking strategies, the larger the budget the more you can take advantage of this strategy. For web developers it just takes a lot of time to develop so many templates but one way to do it is also to specialize.
This is one of the most used and talked about link building campaing solutions. This can be done by both amateurs and professional search engine optimization experts. While usually not particularly effective because of it wide use and abuse...it can still be harnessed as a powerful link building strategy if done the right way. The secret lies in creating the postings and not in replying to them. These days, posting comments on blogs rarely results in effective link building SEO. Blogging is a trend and has been abused by spammers, for that reason almost all blogging platforms now enforce the no follow link attribute, this means that Google will not take the link juice into consideration and give your site “link love”. The no follow link attribute is especially used with Word Press blogs that are one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world at the time of this writing. So how can blogging be used to build incoming links to your website? Start the blog thread yourself and make sure the article is of top quality and of very high content and quality. It will also need to be quite detailed and have links to your site that are directly related to the blog in question. This is something that you can do on your if you are a natural talented writer free of charge. However, in most cases it's best to hire a professional writer and SEO expert to write and distribute the post to various blogs for you, this will result in the best exposure.
Forums are a way for people to discuss topics in public with both friends, strangers and experts. At the end of a forum post you can usually append your website signature via direct link, profile or forum signature. The best way to use forums for your link building strategy is to post and ask questions on forums you are passionate about. It also helps if you are already a webmaster and own a website where you can post links to yourself with examples of issues, problems or resources available to the forum community. With forums it is very important to be genuine, if forum members and moderators feel that you are only trying to build links to your website they will delete the links or even worse delete your post and all your forum link building efforts will be in vain. This link building method usually needs to be done by the webmaster of the site directly.
This forum linking strategy can be used on forums you are passionate about or about a subject you are very interested in. The forums don't necessarily need to be related to your industry although this could help in some cases if you use anchor text in either your signature or the post itself. But usually the signature or link needs to be related to the forum thread topic. On forums you can both answer or ask questions with your appended signature or link to your website so this can work for do it yourselfers or experienced SEO experts and webmasters.
Once again this link building idea is targeted at webmasters, web designers, website developers, graphic artists and various internet professionals. The idea is to develop an online tool that can ONLY be used online. So if the webmaster needs to tell his compatriots how to use it he must post a link to your tool on forums, blogs, article directories and social bookmarking sites. This SEO strategy can also be seen as viral as the word spreads around about how good your online web app really is (as long as it's well developed and answers the needs of the web professionals community).
This is definitely not a “do it yourself” link building solution and you will need to hire a professional web developer to build you this online tool. It can be very effective to build oncoming links but also very expensive, this is a link building solution with medium to large business with an appropriate link building budget. These online tools are usually built around PHP technology and interactive applications that can be used online. The services of and expert online web applications web developer is required and it can take considerable time to build such tools. The only tool should also be in the Alpha state before being launched as Beta versions are often buggy and this might actually have a detrimental effect on your online tool link building strategy in the eyes of webmaster that might link to your site. If done right this link building strategy is highly effective.
This is one of the most controversial, unproven and relatively new link building effort. With almost every social bookmarking website embedded with the nofollow attribute it is increasingly difficult to get any page rank and link building juice at all. Many social bookmarking sites also modify the robots.txt file so that comments pages don't even get indexed by major search engines. This defeats the purpose of link building but regardless seems to be the trend in social bookmarking trends...So how can direct social bookmarking be beneficial to your link building efforts? By having a link from the social bookmarking site to a resource on your site that they will then linked to bypassing the social bookmarking site altogether. In other words, don't give out the whole content, quality or resource on the social bookmarking site, simply offer a “teaser” to your own resource on your website. This is a little like a third party referral to yourself. If crafted properly, social bookmarking link strategies can still be effective.
So what bookmarking site should you use? The larger ones are usually the worse because they ALL have the no follow tag so you will not get any benefits at all to post any kind of content on them. These large social bookmarking websites are usually a take-take proposition. You give them content, they profit from you from advertising revenues and you get no benefit...so it is important to carefully choose what social bookmarking site.