Stress
Free Link Building
By John Alexander
This article first appeared in
Website Magazine
Have you ever felt pressure to build links to your website? I often hear this from new SEO students, as well as experienced professionals.
Link building is an extremely important aspect to SEO – that’s true.
Link building does take work, but that does not mean you need to experience mountains of worry and stress over building effective links. What follows are proven, effective ways to build links to your website, stress-free.
1. Build Unique, Helpful Content. You have likely heard this advice before, but it remains one of the most effective ways to build quality links. Creating quality content does not mean hours of hair-pulling brainstorming and frantic, late-night blogging. This first tip will require work, but not stress.
Examples:
• I built a resource page for a logistics client that was simply a list of the most useful links that anyone might refer to if they had an item to ship. It listed shipping information by rail or by air as well as schedules. It listed Info on shipping refrigerated or unrefrigerated items. The page was simply a list of good resources for anyone who makes shipments. It was not long before my client had many websites linking to the page.
Suggestions for sites you could begin building this weekend:
Keep in mind the triggers that engage your visitors and get them to respond right now.
Does your product or service do any of the following?
- Save time
- Save money
- Make money
- Improve processes
- Improve the customers appearance
- Appeal to a specific brand
- Remove doubt or settle an argument
- Promote some aspect of health
- Promote some aspect of safety
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These are all sales related triggers that you need to keep in mind when building a resource related Web site.
• Is there a cool tool related to your business that you could add into your website that
you think people would like to use?
Example Recommended Tools:
Camtasia is an excellent tool for creating your own desk top tutorial videos
To convert Video into Flash try and a variety of other formats, check out
Geovid
Whatever you come up with, if it is useful or even just plain entertaining, people will
often link to your site naturally and talk about it to their
readers about it. Someday, I am going to write an article
just on how you can create useful and creative content with
specific tools but for this article, I'll stick to stress
free link building tips.
2. Create News Items. Did you know that legitimate news is not considered duplicate content but rather syndicated content and 100 percent white-hat?
Start writing some news stories in your industry – and when you publish news with a link through a site like PRweb.com, it can be picked up by hundreds of other media outlets. This is extremely legitimate syndicated content.
3. Write Original Articles. If you choose to publish unique articles, include your links in your bio at the bottom of the article – no matter where it is published. You will build link reputation but also get some big traffic spikes if your article is published across several websites.
These should not be Web sites that you personally own, but
submit your articles to article directories.
Article Directories to Start With Include:
http://www.evancarmichael.com
A great place to start attracting new audiences who are actually business entrepreneurs
http://www.Goarticles.com
A great and busy directory where you can submit your articles by categories
http://ezinearticles.com
Very busy article directory (highly recommended)
http://www.suite101.com
Lots of categories – and the site generally carries a PR 6/7
Other
Easy Link Building Tips:
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Remember the 80/20 rule for link (anchor) text. Focus 80 percent of the time on your researched keyword phrase and 20 percent using related synonyms. The technical term for this is allowing for Topic Drift so that your links are never identical.
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Remember that your goal is no longer just about the number of links coming into your website, it is also about the specific text used in the link. (For example don’t use ‘Click Here’).
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Links from within your own website still matter – they are just not quite as influential as the links coming in from other sites.
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Links coming from authoritative websites will count more than links from sites that have little traffic.
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If blogging, keep comments turned “on.” It becomes much easier to link with other bloggers due to the mind set about community conversations. Blogs can become like living breathing entities with huge conversation trails taking place. Become part of that community and you’ll soon discover that the stigma in linking to others is not the same with blogging as it is
SEO.
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Link building remains vital to every SEO strategy. Only persistent work will result in large quantities of quality
well related incoming links. Link-building will always require effort but, following these tips, it can be done in a white-hat, stress-free environment.
Do you need help finding the right kind of authoritative
links?
About
John Alexander:
John Alexander is co-founder and director of the Search Engine Academy, leading provider of hands-on search engine optimization training at
locations across the United States, Canada, Asia and
Australia. John also writes hundreds of free SEO tips of
the day - you can sing up for one free tip a day here.
