Some of the best, most targeted traffic to your website doesn’t always come from your articles, your search engine results or even your pay-per-click ads. It comes from your “link partners” – those quality, non-competitive sites you’ve shared links with in an effort to increase traffic for each of you.
It used to be that Google and other search engines ranked sites based on the number of incoming links they had pointing to them. So, being the clever humans we are, some people decided to one-up the system by getting massive amounts of links from everywhere pointed at them. This was commonly done through so-called “marketing tactics” like blog comment spam, link directories and free-for-all link sites.
Thankfully, the search engines have grown up and have placed more emphasis on not just the links you have pointing to you, but the other sites you’ve linked to as well. But that doesn’t mean you just spend a day going out and collecting URLs and email addresses to contact people for a “link exchange”. These days, no webmaster or website owner is going to link to your page just because you asked.
The truth is, it can seem overwhelming for the beginning website owner to get anyone to notice them…
So what do you do? Here are my top 3 link building tactics that I’ve used for my clients to help them build strong, popular and “evergreen” websites that people enjoy discovering, sharing and reading.
1. Stay On Top of Industry Trends and News – It should go without saying that knowing the ins and outs of your industry is crucial to your success – but pay close attention to those email newsletters you’re subscribed to. Who’s writing the content, and what makes them an authority on the subject?
These are the kinds of people you want to attract to your own site. Watch their blogs and make constructive comments or raise interesting questions. Even if the site owner themselves doesn’t respond, other commenters will notice and – over time, the more you participate, the more you’ll be recognized. The same goes for participating on forums, newsgroups and social marketing outlets. The more you make a name for yourself in industry circles, the more likely you are to get noticed.
2. Continually Add Fresh, Helpful Content – Content may be king, but the quality of that content is queen – and she’s quietly behind-the-scenes, making the crucial decisions that will affect the kingdom positively or negatively. Look at your content the same way. You can write a lot – but make sure you have something to say. Quality content gets noticed, gets read and gets shared. Don’t forget — your audience is your “kingdom”.
Adding content also doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You don’t have to write grand 800-page word posts, but half of a page highlighting something interesting you learned in your industry — perhaps a new technique, a new piece of software, a great supplier – all of this helps make Google and other search engines enthusiastic about visiting your site (not to mention the visitors they bring with them!)
3. Choose Keywords Wisely – You probably already have a list of keywords you use when marketing your sites to the search engines, but getting people to link to you using your keywords is difficult. One easy workaround is the fact that, when linking, people often use an article or blog post title to point to something specific. If you can include one of your keywords in that title, it can help your search engine results as well – a true win-win!
To find out how many links are pointing to your site, and who they’re from, you can use Google Webmaster Tools – it’s free and easy to setup. Here is more information from their blog about finding your incoming links.
For more information on building a linking strategy that works, check out a blog devoted entirely to link promotion – linkingmatters.com. They have a free report on creating a link marketing plan that you can download by clicking here. The site is interesting since it started as a test area to build up the website’s visibility, and now it’s ranked highly in the search engines as a result!
Tags: backlinks, link marketing, linking
true. having a keyword or two in a post title has all that upside, in relation to backlinks, and not that much downside.