Blogging For Links – Linkbait

Blogging is great way to generate more content for your website. Before, we answered the question – company blog – onsite or offsite? We came to a conclusion that onsite might be more beneficial as you are adding new fresh content to your main website often (hopefully daily). Well apart from the obvious benefit of new fresh content being added to you website, you also have a great opportunity to attract all important links. How do you do this? Well in the SEO world we like to call this linkbait.

Linkbait.

Basically linkbait can be defined as writing something so good on your website that people want to link to your post as it gives their blog more value. Let’s take a look at some common linkbaiting techniques:

Talk about a certain community:If you know something about a certain community write a good, thoughtful post on them. Chances are that if the post is good enough you will attract links from that communities online presence.

Be Thorough: Leave no stone unturned. A well researched article has a good chance of being linked to.

Be Controversial: You don’t always have to follow what other people say. If you feel different to a public opinion, write about it! Not only will you get tongues wagging, you might also attract some great links.

Write an article about someone important. Even better, if you can mix this with something controversial you will attract a bunch of links. This Britney Spears……

These are just a few ways that you can build good linkbait. If you spend any time at all looking for new links, you will see the importance of this process. It can take hours to write a good, we research article, but you will save DAYS on link building.

Build Reciprocal Links – Is It Worth It?

Link building is an extremely important part of the SEO process. Incoming links to your website are seen as a vote to search engines. This means that you have something good and so worthwhile on your website that someone else is willing to link to you. There are a few different types of linking strategies that you can use.

You can build reciprocal links which we will get to in a moment.

You can build one way links, meaning that someone links to you and you don’t link back to them.

Or you can build three way links. This can be done if: site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A.

Out of those three techniques the winner is one way linking. You get maximum PageRank from quality, anchor text targeted one way links. That begs the question: when you build reciprocal links, is it worth it?

Well it’s actually quite a difficult question to answer. I know some people that swear by it, and others that wouldn’t touch them with a stick. My personal opinion is that, like with everything in life, use them in moderation. Obviously first prize are quality, one way links. However, they are a lot harder to get than reciprocal links. So if you are looking to build reciprocal links, here are a few tips to help you out:

1. Place a link on your site to the other site before you approach the webmaster. This is a must do. Before you ask anyone to trade links with you, you should always first place a link on your website to them.

2. See how many links are on their “link” page. You really dont want to be at the bottom of a list of 200 links. See how many links the website has on the page where you are likely to be linked to from. Rule of thumb: if there are already 20+ links on that page, move on.

Building reciprocal links can be worth it, however for a more effective link building campaign, go for one way links. This way you can take full advantage of the link juice that is passed from the other website.

Interlinking – The Great Link Opportunity

Oh boy, this is an oldie, but a goodie. I see this time and time again on websites. Webmasters are missing out on the ideal opportunity to channel their PageRank and funnel it to the most important pages on their website. It still amazes me how many websites miss out on this opportunity.

Great Link Opportunity #1: Your Logo

Many websites these days are built from CMS systems. Two popular ones that come to mind are WordPress and Joomla. The reason being it makes it very easy for the average Joe to have their own website without having any real technical skills. For these types of websites you might notice that the name of your blog or your logo will directly link to the homepage. The thing is, many pages that are not made from CMS systems like this forget to link the logo to the home page. This is a great interlinking chance gone astray.

Great Link Opportunity #2: Use your menus.

If you do use a CMS, you have little say on the structure of your menus. WordPress for example, will automatically add links to the pages in the horizontal menu and posts to the vertical menu on your site. While this may work you could also try and make links on the footer. Create a footer menu and you can channel your PageRank to the most important pages on your site. Remember, it is not completely necessary to link to EVERY page on your website from the footer menu, only the most important pages on your site, i.e. your money pages.

Great Link Opportunity #3: In content linking.

Within your pages you should have your main targeted keywords sprinkled around your content. These keywords are awesome anchor text opportunities. What what you need to to do is link these keywords to the relevant page they are related too (i.e. if you are trying to rank for the term link building, then use that as anchor text to link to the page that you are trying to rank for.)

These are some great ways to take full advantage of internal linking on your website.

Know Your Enemy Part 3 – Get Them Links!

In the first part of know your enemy, we spoke how to analyze your competition. In the second part, our on page assault we saw how you can analyze competing websites in your industry and learn from their mistakes and make your website as search engine friendly as possible. Now we come to one of the most important parts of the SEO process – link building. This is one of my favorite methods to find quality, one way links.

From the first two steps you would have come up with some great keywords. You would have also been able to  distinguish exactly who your competition is and what they are doing on their websites. By now (hopefully) you would have a nice website built, used your research to come up with better on page optimisation than your competition. Now its time to build links.

It wouldn’t be part of know your enemy if it this did not have something to do with your competition. What I like to do is analyze my competitions’ inbound links and see whether I can get one from that website too.

All you need to do is use Yahoo! Site explorer

Type in link:www.competitorswebsite.com

You will get a list of many pages that link to your competitor.

Now go through the list and make a spreadsheet of websites that you are going to contact and ask about a link.

Remember, its quality not quantity when you are link building.

Linkbuilding Tip – Something A Little Different

The problem surely will arise at some stage. You have been relentlessly building targeted, oneway links, to your website. Using all the tips and tricks that you have learned. You have submitted your website to a million and one directories, you have written tons of articles and submitted them all over the web strategically linking back to your website. You have commented on blogs, used social media, forum posting the list goes on. Sometimes the linkbuilding scene can get saturated and you need to think outside the box.

No For Something Completely Diffferent.

Do you know what 404 pages are? If you use this blog for example and copy this into the address bar :

http://seotipstricksandmore.wordpress.com/this-does-not-exist

you will come to a page that doesn’t exist.

Right so how can these help you with your linkbuilding crusade, I hear you ask.

Well, there millions of 404 pages out there. And once upon a time those were working pages, and those working pages might have been linked to by other people…..

See where we are headin’?

Right, so now we need to put the big G to good use and type in a few little search terms. Lets say that we are trying to find links for an online toy shop, type in:

“404 not found” toy shop
then
“404 not found” online toy shop
then
“404 not found” online toy store

Basically you type in “404 not found” NICHE HERE.

You see some nice results! Quite a few webpages that are not there anymore. You next step is using Yahoo!’s site explorer and find out if there are any links coming into that site.

If there are, go to the pages where those links are and send them an email explaining that the link is pointing to a dead page and they should rather link to you.

That’s a little different way to get some new links to your website.