Written by Jon Ostler, founder of First Rate
as published in SearchInsider (October)
I’m sure we all know by now that links are important and that the more quality and relevant links to your site and its pages the better your search engine rankings are likely to be. So every search engine marketer and web site owner should have links, link popularity and page rank top of mind. Not sure how well you are doing?
The importance of links and their impact on search engine rankings and traffic has motivated many to seek for quick fixes and automated solutions. These approaches tend to focus purely on building the maximum number of links with the minimum amount of effort, with little regard for relevancy, usefulness or ethics. This has resulted in an explosion in link farms, reciprocal link spam and many other attempts to build links quickly at minimal cost. Obviously the search engines are not too happy about this as it is often used to make low value sites look popular and respected when in fact they have little to offer internet users. Search engines have gone out of their way to minimise the impact of these approach.
I would suggest that a more sustainable and effective approach is to focus on marketing activities that generate links as a by-product of the core activity which in itself has a true marketing value. Below I discuss at a high level some of the more important marketing activities that build links to your site.
Content is King
It’s a bit like “exercise more, eat less” we have all heard it a thousand times but this only make it more true. The most effective link building strategy of all is to simply add valuable content to your website. Other sites will link to your content if they believe their own visitors will find it useful. Popular content includes presentations, whitepapers, newsletters and the ever popular Blog. In the case of a Blog it is important that you use a system that allows you to host the Blog under your own domain name so the links to the Blog go to your domain name not the Blogging system. Another simple approach is to provide a “Link to this article” system that automatically produces linking code for the article in question.
Distributed Content
The traditional way of distributing content is to allow sites to republish your articles and content if they agree to include a link at the bottom of the article. A more contemporary approach is to use RSS to distribute your sites latest content to other sites. This allows you to automatically update all the sites publishing your content with the latest news or articles by updating the centrally hosted RSS feed. Both PHP and JavaScript are commonly used to insert the RSS contents into the other sites page. With the PHP method all the links are direct and search engine friendly, with a JavaScript system the links are not detected by the search engine and so are not counted this can be fixed by adding a static link to your site below the JavaScript. A good republishing system is provided by www.feedrollpro.com.
“Powered By”
If you provide an online service or tool then the good old fashioned “powered by” link is a must. Search Engines have started to reduce the relevancy of these types of link as large online service providers can easily generate thousands of identical links using this approach, however the approach still works and is still valid both as a link building and brand building exercise.
Awards
If you are a respected industry commentator then presenting awards to sites can be an effective way to reinforce your brand position and also build quality links. Hitwise is a good example: www.hitwise.com/contact-us/top-10-award-registration.php
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing in itself is a very effective marketing tactic but as www.Amazon.com with its million plus links has demonstrated it is also great link builder. As with the Blog and RSS approaches it is essential that the links used by affiliates point directly to your domain name and are not to the Affiliate system you happen to be using (most affiliate systems have a “direct linking” option).
So in conclusion don’t kill yourself obsessing over links for links sake, implement a diverse online marketing plan that offering valuable content and working with other sites and your links will take care of themselves.