Saturday, December 6, 2008 at 9:11AM Introduction to Easy Link Building
Sorry its been a while since our last article but we have been swamped with work requests so its taken a while to get enough free time to write our next article. This week we look at 5 Free or Cheap and easy ways to start building links. Your feedback has been great so far and we apologise for taking a while to get back. Keep sending the comments and questions and we will get around to responding. Enjoy this weeks tips!
1. Natural Link Building
Great content will makes link building and page optimization so much easier. There I said it, Content. Content, Content, Content. When will I ever stop speaking about great content? I don’t know, probably never so stop nagging me about it.
But back to link building. If you want to get other good quality sites to link to you, you need to offer them something no one else can, and that’s where great content comes in. If your site offers a unique perspective on a given topic, other sites will naturally want to link to you. This is why you hear so many SEO-ers out there talking about optimizing each individual page. Studies have shown that people are more likely to link to a particular page within a site because of the content, article, picture, etc. of that page than they are to your more generic home page.
So what does that mean? It means you need to take a look at each page of your web site and optimize that page specifically for the information that can be found on that site as opposed to the information found on your home page so that when Searchers are looking for information to link to or quote, they find that page instead of missing the valuable information that is on it because it is optimized in the same fashion as your home page.
Now on to more about cheap and or free ethical ways to build links:
2. Social Networking Sites (just don’t spam)
If you have: a great insight, great article, great tool, great story to share with the world, let the world know about it. In the past few years social news sites including Digg, reddit, del.icio.us and technorati (to name a few), have become popular with individuals looking for news and information relative to them. We here at SocialTrending encourage you to submit your valuable information to these sites if that news / information pertains to the following guidelines.
a. The information is Authentic and Unique
b. You do not attempt to force or buy your way up the list
c. You do not spam the site with drivel
If you can keep to those three rules, and add value to the sites, the networks will accept you and your link building will have begun.
3. Free directories
Dmoz is the most recognized free directory out there but there are thousands of other directories and links lists available so start searching and get added to those that you can. Word of warning, avoid any directories that require a fee or link exchange. Most of these sites are not worth your time or money and add little if any link power to your site.
If you have been trying to get listed on DMOZ for a while now, there are a couple of things you can do to increase your chances of being registered.
First, your site needs to have great content and be visually stimulating (there’s that great content again.
Second, you need to make sure your site brings a unique value to the table. DMOZ does not want to keep listing thousands of seemingly identical sites so make your offering stand out.
4. Press Releases
We offer a Dynamic Content service that covers everything from writing Onsite Content to the aforementioned Press Releases. Our creative time have mastered the Press Releases and give these hints: Make sure to optimize key words in either the title or through anchor text, include our Beyond creating links and driving people to your site Press Releases can rank well on their own, especially just after release as they are picked up by the web wires. Don’t be surprised if a well written article with a unique perspective gets picked up by a larger news site.
However, it helps if you have the money to submit the article to an established news distribution site. I have listed some of the big ones below but if you do a bit of research you can find free sites. Note, often times the free sites will have less market reach.
The top two sites listed are the largest, with the greatest distribution networks. We have tried the various levels of distribution offered by the sites above and our Social Media Monitoring has shown that it is worth the extra money to go with the best (and of course most expensive) offering from sites like www.prweb.com. Our findings show that the top offering from these sites covers the largest market, generates the most links, and is more likely to be picked up by a larger news site. I should mention that the top offerings tend to not cost much more than their intermediate offerings so if you have a little bit of extra cash, don’t skimp out here.
5. Get bloggers to grade your site / product / article / service
Bloggers are always looking for something to write about so why not give them something to review. Similar to press releases, you need to have a good article/ product / service for them to review but once you do, start spreading the word.
It is easy to find the big hitters in your industries blogosphere and once you do, you may, or may not, incentivise them to review your article / produce / service. Make sure to provide them a little bit of background on your company and the article. If they like what they see they will write about it. However, many of these big hitters are inundated with calls to review so your article needs to be compelling or the bloggers will not waste their time.
Well that’s just an intro and a fairly easy, cheap way to get started with you link building. If you’re looking for someone with experience to manage your link building campaign, get in contact and we will see what we can do.
*As a bonus I thought I would include this funny article on link building. It is called the 10 commandments of link building and if your a bit of a techie or SEO-er, you’ll find it funny: http://www.ericward.com/linkmoses/ten.html
Reader Comments (3)
If you are going to reco spam houses like preweb.com and prleap.com, at least also reco a vetted quality controlled service like urlwire
First we want to apologies to everyone for the mistake in website listings. Preweb.com should have been www.prweb.com, we have made the change in the article. Next, thanks to PRmaven for the heads up about www.urlwire.com, it is another good site that can be used to promote your blog / news articles. However, we disagree with the statements about prweb and prleap being spam. We have had successful dealings with both PRweb and PRleap with both generating good results, PRweb in particular proving a cost worthy option for companies with minimal marketing budgets.
Hopefully you can help us out with our assessment of urlwire. Urlwire seems to focus more on the promotion of a company’s through a direct link to the newsroom or the link to an article (standard or blog) that is hosted on that company’s website. PRweb and PRleap differ in that they push the article onto other news worthy sites and/or blogs and utilize anchor text to build inward links. We have not had the opportunity to try urlwire but will definitely give it a go when we get the right opportunity.
-SocialTrending.
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