Link building takes much time and effort. You might be spending hours daily pursuing links and missing the most important thing: your resource attracts people; why not make the most of that?
Nowadays, I guess everyone has some web space to place your link at: be it a site or a social media profile page. Thus each of your visitors is your potential promoter. Add a well-executed call to action encouraging people to link back and you’ll see your back link number growing!
1. Create cool badges matching your brand design.
A great example of this tactic (successfully implemented) is SEOmoz that promotes its badges throughout the site:
Link building with the help of badges is not a new tactic but it’s still a highly effective method, especially for user-generated (or partially user-generated) sites. If you operate a social network with some solid membership, you can boost your external linking by offering your members a way to link to their profiles at your page.
Make your community badges customizable and make it a fun process to customize them: create a sleek interface, allow your members to choose the color, put their names / user names on the badge, let them instantly preview the badge. Today every member of any social networking site has at least 10 other places to put this badge on : other social sites, blog platforms, online resumes, etc.
2. Create a relevant widget.
I love using this method for “mini-sites” created for link bait or viral marketing to help spread the word. This shouldn’t be something too complex; a small good-looking count-down widget showing how much time before the event is left should be enough.
3. Show how to link to each of your tool / eBook / guide / contest / etc page (any piece of content you have created for link bait).
In other words, include a short piece of text informing the visitor how to link back to it at each page containing some really useful piece of content:
4. Create a separate page listing all possible methods to link to you: text links, badges, banners, widgeds, etc. Clearly state why anyone would want to link back to you. Add your contact details for ore information.
Great tips. We mention this article in our blog.
This is great info. Ann, concisely put, social media focused.
User generated content is so much where things are at these days, user generated links is an obvious next step. Your examples are good, inspiring. Thank you.
I see charity sites making pages with banners and link code and so forth all the time. It’s easy being a .org in the internet universe. Displaying link code with anchor text IS a good idea – ty
Ive been testing a few ways to grow traffic… I know this one is not traditional but I wanted to see if anyone knows if it will hurt my rank… and if it doesn’t, why no one else does it.
A few years ago I had an email account that seemed to be a magnet for spam, a few months ago I gave up on that email account as 99.9999% of the mail was spam (I think I get about 5,000 spam emails every 6 months there and the number seems to grow as my email address gets sold and resold and rented off to countless marketers)
Last week I decided to disable the spam filter on that account so EVERYTHING would be sent to my inbox (I promise this will make sense in a second, just bare with me). I also set up a vacation response which auto responds to EVERY email I get, it simply says
“I would like to thank you for your email, I will reply just as soon as I can. Please visit my new website at http://www.regular87.com to learn how to save money on gasoline.”
I hate spam, so part of the reason I did this was to get back at those “monsters” that took over my email account… One of the cool things about this is that my automated response email is not filtered as “spam” because it is a direct response to an email they had sent.
The reason I am posting this here is because I believe my incoming email will continue to grow as my email address is sold to more spammers, “using visitors to gain new visitors exc.”
Since setting this up I have been getting a lot of direct hits from all over the world (not a huge fan of the amiability of this method).
I am not absolutely sure that the hits are coming from the email as I do not have a tracking thing in place but I do know that my direct hits have tremendously jumped lately.
Will this “reverse spam” negatively effect my google ranking? Are there any potential repercussions for this action?
Nick, the from info in spam is always fake. Your auto-reply is spamming totally innocent people.
Ive heard of viruses and worms that can self generate spam from an unsuspecting in-box, I didn’t realize that it was common practice.
Spammers never want to be traced, so only incompetent ones don’t fake it.
This goes into more detail:
http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/05/out-of-office-auto-replies-considered-harmful/
You should always add a touch of your business branding into any social profile you build.
We recently upgraded our site to make it more SEO Friendly, you can see at the bottom footer of the site we have added some relevant text about the site that is not normally listed in the front page code. Its very important for link building and SEO for the bots.
great tips Ann, thanks
This is a great information, but what about making blogs popular?
Another thing that could make your site SEO friendly is that the badge should link to your freebies or give-aways such as ebooks. Then put some link on that e-book. Isn’t that more amazing?
Your writing is so clear! I’m signing up as a follower because you’re so easy to understand, and I have sooooo much I need to learn. I’m on ground floor wishing for a launchpad.
@Carol, thanks for the kind words. I was doing my best to sound clear and glad you noticed my efforts :)