Dec 16 2008

How to Build Links with HOW-TO Content

Writing and promoting how-to articles is one of the most effective ways to get solid links. While like any other content, it takes time and effort, the outcome is well worth it.

Let’s look at a few useful resources designed for how-to content that can help you gain links and awareness:

Promote a good detailed step-by-step tutorial at user-generated how-to article directories. Instructables.com is a great place to host and promote tutorial on any topic. It allows for “dofollow” links and offers a few ways to get your content noticed (e.g. nominate it for some relevant competition). Ehow is another popular partially user-generated how-to article directory (but it nofollows all external links).
Create a slide show and get it help you promote your how-to content. Slide Share allows you to host your slide shows and among other advantages, it also offers a good non-nofollow link from the user profile page. Moreover, if you embed the show to your own site, Slide Share will also automatically add a link to your site from the slide show page.
Promote your how to videos at WonderHowTo.com which also allows to add non-nofollow links from the video page. HowCast.com is another great video how-to community (where writers and filmmakers cooperate) but it “nofollows” all external links.
Create a how-to eBook and promote it at Scribd – it allows to post a direct “dofollow” link to your site from the user profile page as well as “Source URL” from the book info page. Scribd is something like Youtube for documents. You can download any eBook, grab an embed code to post it to your page, add books to your favorites, etc. What’s more, it will also show you some useful eBook promotion stats: how many times your book was viewed, how many time the Googlebot visited the page and also which Google searches brought visitors to your eBook page.

Any more ideas on promoting how-to content? Please share!

Written By:

Ann Smarty | @seosmarty

Ann Smarty is the Director of Media at BlueGlass where she serves as the Editor of Search Engine Journal. Ann's expertise in blogging and tools serve as a base for her writing, tutorials and her guest blogging project, MyGuestBlog.

More Posts By Ann Smarty

Randal Oulton

I'd encourage anyone referencing ehow pages as a source, to ensure that the links to them include the nofollow tag. What's good for the goose, is good for the gander. They are trying to appear legitimate by encouraging anyone to do precis's of other people's original research, and appearing to source the work, while tacking no follow tags onto the reference to ensure that no benefit actually accrues to the site that did the original research. Slimy. Actually, on second thought, maybe better to just not reference them as a source at all -- even the precising they do isn't that great.
Michael Ciucci

Thanks for the tips, Ann. I've only been doing SEO for a short period of time, and it's always a work in progress. Thanks for the extra tips!
loanmodleads

writer@gig : bukisa is no more a dofollow site ,now they nofollow within article links as well as profile links.
just wanted to put this update here
Kingsley Tagbo - IT Career Boo

Your article provided some new places that I didn't know of before. I will look into using the additional resources you mentioned.
Malte Landwehr

When you have a really good HowTo video, try to post it at videojug.com, I often use that site as a resource myself.
When you place HowTo content on your own website (or embed a slideshow/video) place a del.icio.us button next to it. Delicious users love HowTos; its the easiest way to there front page and many power users will blog their bookmarks of the day (or week) automatically on their blog, so you will get a lot of nice backlinks.
Donna

Great suggestion Malte! That's exactly what most of my delicious links are to... tutorials. I never thought of putting the delicious button next to a video tutorial. I'm just about to start doing video tutorials though, so I'll definitely give your technique a go.
ALRADY

Thank you ... It seems I have to constantly do workaround for the ehow stuff. RSS tools are gone. EHOW is best thing going IMHO but the other sites are bringing on great tools for marketing articles.

I will try this . right now I do a stable list on twitwall. I had a headline animator but could not make it work with article list. Let's hope this works.
Donna

Great article Ann! I knew of many of these sites but you've done the hard work of figuring out if they use the nofollow tag or not. Even though I knew of many of these sites I haven't had time to really use them and check them out - but I'm starting a series of HOW-TO articles/videos to do with Wordpress and Blogging and I'm looking for ways to promote them, so this article will come in handy!

I've know about Scribd for a long time but never really got my head around what you could do with it, from what you've said though you can do a lot more than I realized. Comparing them to YouTube made it instantly understandable.

Thanks also for the sites I didn't know about, both in your article and in some of the comments.
wani

Hmmmmmm
ABnCParties

Why have I been spending all this time on Ehow?
WriterGig @ Bukisa

I forgot to mention, Bukisa is a new how-to site that DOES allow do-follow links. A very cool new space on the web, even if it is not as big or accomplished as eHow.
WriterGig

While eHow does, unfortunately, no-follow external links in the articles resources section, the links in the author's bio on the profile page, as well as those posted in groups and on the forums, seem to be do-follow at the moment.
Ann Smarty

@Ryan, Net, great additions! Thanks a lot!
net soft

may http://www.howtoforge.com/ be useful
From "Contribute" page -- "If you have written a tutorial and would like to share it with others, you can publish it on HowtoForge."
Consumer Court

My dear friend, now a days SEO is the most important and first thing you have to know before starting any website, we a social organization provide free online help to the consumer to solve their own consumer problems, but for the consumer court keyword we are not standing anywhere, after reading too many articles on this website help us to improve our rankings, now we are getting some complaints.
Ryan @ Linkbuildr

Good stuff Ann! Infobarrel.com is another great place for writing how to articles. The domain is strong so you have a great chance of ranking long tails well.
Todd Covington

Hello Ann. I am new to your site and wanted to say hello. I have been reading your articles for a few days and they are fantastic. I'm getting better and better at my SEO but it sure is a long process.
Andy Fox VP Marketing, WonderH

This is true.

Next year we'll be launching a slick text how-to product that will give the author ownership of the page (non-wiki) and a non-nofollow link to the author's website or blog.

SEO is important to our success and we want to help our community get the SE recognition they deserve too.

Feel free to contact me for any future articles in the how-to space.

Cheers,

Andy Fox
nicola antonelli

Hi Ann!
I think another good way to promote 'how to content' is following the most important forums of a specific argument, and link the how to article of your site. Even if most of forums outbound links are with nofollow, many people will read it and the probability of spontaneous link increase.