Mar
25
Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.
Anytime you’re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:
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Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.
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Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.
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Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool; many businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In most cases, though, bloggers aren’t just going to stumble onto your web site. It’s far better for you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t control what a blogger might say, so it’s possible that the review you get won’t be favorable. Its possible to get reviews from small to mid-sized blogs without too much of a problem, but when it comes to getting reviews from the most popular blogger in your niche, it may cost you a few hundred $$$. For example, John Chow charges a whopping $500 for a review, which he doesn’t even write himself.
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Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press releases. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts, including benefits, sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press release marketing to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included.
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Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. You provide a link to people who want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and when someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal you have arranged), the affiliate — the person who placed your link on their site — gets paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05 per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates, and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs. The trick with affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links.
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PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links — you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.
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Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and create the illusion of popularity, you’re going to do more damage than it’s probably worth to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldn’t do it. There are plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work a little harder for the higher quality links.
Inbound links are such an important part of any online marketing strategies that some organizations find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It’s not a bad thing to want to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information is from your web-analytics application. A great and free analytics program available is Google Analytics. Check it out.
So there are my top link snagging tips which i actively employ for most of my online businesses. Which tactics do you use for your website, and have i missed out any good link-snagging techniques? Have your say by leaving me a comment.
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Blog Jocky » Blog Archive » Snagging Inbound Links
Search Marketing » Blog Archive » Snagging Inbound Links
i liked your article you have covered some of the points which are very useful for us in getting inbound links and how to use them in getting links
Writing good articles is probably the best way to get incoming links, especially with social media. Get popular on a social network site such as digg and you will find all the effort you put in to write a good article has paid off. Good post.
Nick’s last blog post..What Do You Want From Social Media?
Writing a good article for me is the best way to get incoming links. The article does not have to be lengthy. Infact, some of the most pingbacks I have ever received are from posts where I was lucky enough to break the news on something first. If you can manage to get the heads up on something and be the first to post it in your niche then you should expect a lot of references to your site.Of course, for anyone to notice your newsbreaking post you probably need to be semi established in the first place with at least a few hundred subscribers if not more.I’m not sure if linking back to yourself is unethical. It depends on the situation. If you are writing a guest post for a blog then yes, it could be viewed as unethical however if its relevant i dont see the problem. At the end of the day the owner of the blog will let you know if your taking liberies by linking to yourself too much.As for writing for your own blog and linking to yourself, I don’t think it’s a problem. Personally, I dont think I do it enough. Are you referring more to mistleading the search engines than linking to relevant posts?
Kevin’s last blog post..I don’t know what to call myself anymore!!
Your advice on press releases is right on the mark.Search engine optimization is particularly important when writing press releases. If you use the same keywords in your releases that people use when searching online for the same information, you can attract a lot of attention for your product, service, cause or issue. I’m offering a free email course called "89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases."I explain why we should no longer be writing press releases only for the press, but for consumers who can find the releases online, click through to our websites and enter our sales cycle, even if journalists don’t think our release is worthy of attention.The course includes several terrific press release samples as well as "before" and "after" makeovers.You can sign up for the free press release writing tutorial at http://www.PublicityHound.com/pressreleasetips/art.htmIt’s a very long tutorial but please stick with it. By the time you’re done, it will be like earning a master’s degree in writing and distributing press releases. And you’ll know more about this topic than many PR people.
Writing a good article isn’t really enough for gathering inbound links. Writing article that people like gathers inbound links and this is called link bait (I guess that you’ve heard that term before ;). I have wrote good articles, informative, useful etc. but I’ve got no links, becouse people find them boring. Only way to get REALLY much links and create real effective link bait is write funny article, release funny picture or write post like "make 50 bucks a day with black hat and adsense".
Hakukoneoptimointi’s last blog post..Hinnoittelu on markkinointia [1]
Yeah i must say i agree with you there. Ive wrote many articles for many blogs and the really in depth informative ones get a few links, but nothing substantial. The funnier and more whitty the post, thats when the additional links come in and what you can really call ‘link bait’
I’ve always heard "Content, content, content."
It would seem to me that placing your articles on others’ sites would devalue the google juice of those articles on your site. It would also seem that controlling, as much as possible (theft is always a problem and there’s no way really for someone without lawyers on retainer to stop it) would be important. In other words, don’t subscribe to any article distribution site that doesn’t give you approval rights. You want to be careful of what neighborhoods your inbound links are coming from.
And don’t you think that google is going to catch onto that method of links baiting just the way they devalued link exchanges?
I’ve found forums to be a good way of generating traffic. The only thing about that is that some forums don’t allow your placing your url in tgheir stie. And I’ve found that playing by the rules is a better way to go. You’ll get burned sooner or later. Heck, it’s hard enough to keep from getting burned even when you have been on the up and up.
That said, I’ve had problems just moving my traffic just above idle, despite a pr of 4…
@ Carbuzzard: Putting content on others sites for the purpose of generating inbound links wouldnt devalue the links themselves. The content its self wont rank all that great, but the links on the page google still takes into consideration.
This method of generating inbound links is a method i use often. The key here is to create content specifically for the purpose of using it for article marketing. Dont post the content on your own site, as your site will be flagged as having duplicate content.
Next you mentioned about google catching onto link baiting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with link baiting. Think about it this way, you are developing a killer piece of content for your website. People love that content so much that they link to it from their website. That is classed as natural linking. There is nothing shady about this tactic. Another way to think about it, say a company/website develops a brilliant tool for people to use. an example here would be iWebTool at http://www.iwebtool.com/ - They have developed several highly popular tools, and people find them so useful they link to them. iWebTool has millions of inbound links as a result of these tools and rank right at the top of the search results. They havent been penalized, Google has taken into consideration all those links, and has determined this must be something very useful to the public and has ranked it accordingly.
Nice article I wrote a similar one recently on link building and my blog is do-follow too - I don’t understand why people make them no-follow.I think forums and blog comments are a great way of getting links as long as the source, destination are semantically linked. A random link from a webmaster forum is not going to pass much link juice. There is also social bookmarking, Squidoo and Zimbio…
Tony Bright’s last blog post..SEO 101: Domain Names
This is a really great article! I am a pretty good programmer, but am kind of lost in a sea of confusion at the moment as to how to build up traffic to my website now that it is ready. I have such a small budget that I want to avoid spending on sponsored links or advertisements, but this article has given me so many other ideas that I hadn’t even considered! Thanks!