Advanced strategies for building inbound links

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

Successful link building is an artful combination of theory and practice.  It is crucial that you understand what kind of links you are looking for and (to a certain extent) why you are looking for those kind of lnks.  However, it is also crucial that you know what to do to get those kind of links and that you actually go out and do it!  This tutorial, therefore, is dedicated to giving you an overview of some of the more successful techniques that you can use to attract lots of high-quality, relevant links to your site.  In later tutorials we will follow up with practical advice on how to successfully implement these ideas.
 

Writing as a link building strategy

Are you ready for the one all-powerful, incredibly-effective link building secret that professionals are using to build huge numbers of incoming links that search engines love?
 

Hire a good writer.

Seems a bit anticlimactic, doesn’t it? But it’s true.  Indeed, hiring a good writer could be the single most powerful tool you can use to dominate the search engines? As such, every online business should have at least one. And we’re not talking about hiring someone on the cheap to write boring “filler” articles for $5 a pop about stuff everyone already knows. And we’re definitely NOT talking about purchasing some automatic article-generating software to crank out reams of useless and meaningless “content”. We’re talking about hiring:

• Someone who understands your industry and has a flair for creating interesting, useful information that people want to read.
• Someone who can create articles that build a buzz!  These are articles that can be reprinted on your own site to attract links, as well as syndicated out to other sites in exchange for a link back to you.
• Someone who can build a blog that generates a hardcore audience of regular readers who can be funneled directly into your sales process.
• Someone who can establish your businesses identity in the forums and usergroups where your customers are congregating.

In short, we are talking about someone who is contributing real value to the global conversation taking place on the Internet and who is strongly identified as the online face of your business.  When done right, this approach is massively effective!

Of course, not every site can afford a good writer.  If that’s the case with you, then you are going to have to find another way to create quality content.  You may just have to dust off the virtual pen and write your own content.  Alternatively, you can look to form a strategic partnership with another company and/or individual who could produce this content for you.  Either way, having a good writer onboard is one of (if not the) most essential elements in a successful link building campaign.

Here, then, are a few of the ways that you or a good content writer can help boost your search engine ranking as well as improve your customer experience:

1. Write articles that can be featured on your site.
   These articles can be about your industry, how-to articles, tutorials, interviews with prominent industry figures, etc.  The golden rule of these articles is that they should be of the highest quality, relevant to your customers needs and interests, useful, and entertaining (a bit of creativity doesn’t hurt either).  For instance, if you can find and/or solve a problem plaguing your customers or other businesses in your
   industry then you have an excellent topic to talk about. Even if you simply clarify the nature of the problem people will find it of interest.  What’s more, a quality article can potentially be used to promote your site on social media sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us.  When used properly, these sites can attract hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links (to learn more about using social media sites as a linking strategy see our Attracting Links with Social Media Sites Tutorial).
    
2. Write articles for syndication.
   There is a huge demand for quality content on the web, and people will gladly offer you a link to your site in exchange for helping them fulfill that need.  Of course, you can use or rework the articles on your site for this purpose, but you can also write articles solely for
   syndication.  
    
3. Write content for a blog.
   A good blog can be an excellent source of links (as you can learn in our Blogging Tutorials).  Creating a high quality, interesting blog can both rank well itself in the search engines as well as send quality links and traffic to your own site.  However, they require a huge amount of work.  It is not easy coming up with new, quality content each and every day.  This is yet another reason why it’s a good idea to have a writer on staff.  In addition to writing articles that build links to your site, that person can be writing and promoting your company’s blog while you’re busy running your business.
    
4. Participate in forums
   Internet forums are a good way to create and maintain a public face for your company.  By doing so you can increase your company’s exposure and interact directly with potential customers.  Like blogging, this is also quite labor-intensive. In order for this to pay dividends, you (or your writer) must establish yourself as an authority (preferably a moderator) in the forum before they can expect to have much influence. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of forums by contributing helpful, informed advice than you will by promoting yourself or your business. Once you establish credibility, you’ll find that forums can be a fairly reliable source of targeted traffic for your business.   While it’s important to establish yourself in the most widely-read forums that relate to your industry, it’s also nice if the forum lets you place within your signature line a link back to your company’s site. Not only does this make it easier for people to find your site, it also helps build a small amount of link equity along the way.
    
5. Distributing Press Releases
   Creating and distributing a press release means that your press release can then be found in new search engines, such as Google News, Yahoo News, MSN News, Ask Jeeves News, Topix.net, and many others. This increases the chance that they get read by potential customers who may never have found your site if not for the press release.  It also means that your press release is more likely to be found by journalists. Many journalists routinely read press releases when looking for new stories to cover. 
   If they choose to cover your press release in their publication, that could lead to another source of traffic and incoming links.  Including links to your site in your press release helps to increase your link popularity, as well as drive additional traffic to your site. And if your press release is syndicated in an RSS feed and redisplayed on those web sites that use RSS feeds to provide an automated source of content for their sites, that could lead to an exponential increase in the number of incoming links and traffic to your site.

Programming as a link building strategy

The benefits of hiring a good writer are clear.  There is,
however, another "secret weapon" that you can use to increase your site
reputation and link popularity…

Hire a good programmer.

Building and distributing software tools (for
free) can be an extremely powerful way of attracting a large number of incoming
links.  For instance, have you
ever notice that the homepage for WordPress.org is a PageRank 9?  That’s largely because of the huge number of sites that use the WordPress blogging software, which conveniently features a powered by WordPress link built into its web interface. Multiply that out over millions of blogs and you get a recipe for a very powerful incoming link structure. Your business may not be able to duplicate the extraordinary success of WordPress, but their example illustrates a powerful way to accumulate incoming links by building a popular web-based software and distributing it with an embedded backlink in the user interface.

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to give away your software inventions in order to gain some qualiyt incoming links.  You can also build a tool that’s a popular resource and host it on your own site in order to attract links.  For instance, take a look at MarketLeap’s Link Popularity tool: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop. That’s a PageRank 7 page with 28,800 links in Yahoo (Yahoo gives a more complete picture of the total links to a page than most other search engines). Why the large number of links? Because it’s a valuable, free tool used by a large number of people. Ask yourself: is there a valuable tool you could be offering your customers?

How to win friends and attract links

There’s an often-overlooked social networking aspect to link building.  If you’re well-known and have a lot of connections in your industry or an industry closely related to yours, then it can be easy to use those connections to get links to your site. Hypothetically, if you had a site that sold bodybuilding supplements, and your uncle was Arnold Schwarzenegger, you probably wouldn’t have much trouble getting him to link to your site from his own. This tongue-in-cheek example just illustrates the fact that who you are and who you know plays a big role in link building.  You may find that networking and going to industry conferences to make contacts is a much more effective link-building strategy than just about anything else you can do.

 

Finding the Right Link Balance
You’ll want to avoid letting your incoming link structure get too homogeneous. Incoming links from only one type of site or only to your homepage or all with identical anchor text are telltale clues that could potentially cause a search engine to flag your site for an unnatural link structure. Instead, strive for an 80/20 balance:

• 80% of your links from topically relevant sources
  20% from unrelated or marginally related sources.
• 80% of your incoming links going to your homepage
  20% of your links going to subpages deeper within your site. 
• 80% of your links with your keywords in the anchor text
  20% percent with “click here” or your domain name in the anchor text.  
• 80% of your links are one-way links
  20% are reciprocal.

And so on. Of course, these numbers are just general, and somewhat arbitrary, guidelines. The point is that you don’t want your site to appear overly-optimized, so it’s important to mix things up a bit.
 

Is Having a Great Site Enough?

Some webmasters claim that having the best site for your category will be enough to attract all the links you’ll ever need. They profess that time spent on building links is actually better spent on improving your web site. Although this is partially true, the fact remains that there are many, many great sites that provide top notch content BUT get very meager traffic because of poor
search engine positioning. Other sites would surely link to them IF they knew about them, but, without links to get them seen in the search engines in the first place, people simply don’t find them and, thus, no one ever links to them.

To paraphrase an old saying: it takes links to make links!
As your site improves its search engine ranking, you’ll begin to see a sort of snowball effect in which you start acquiring links without even asking for them, simply because your site is more visible. Webpages that enjoy top rankings for a competitive keyword can often acquire large numbers of links without even trying. But if you’re link-poor, it can be extraordinarily challenging to get a leg up without actively seeking links.

 

No Missing Links
When just starting out, getting links can be a challenging and time consuming process. Many of your efforts may prove fruitless when sites decline to link to you no matter what you do.  However, the smart marketer knows that competitors have already blazed the trail.  In many cases, the way to start is by finding pages that rank well for your keywords, and emulating your competitors’ link-building strategies.
For instance, watch
this video of SEO Elite to see how you can discover which sites are linking to your competitors.  Then, instead of asking for a link exchange from
these sites, think of other creative ways that you can use to get them to link to you (offering them content, articles, software, money, etc.). 

By offering quality content to sites that are linking to your competitors, and integrating the strategies outlined above, you’ll soon find your pages in the mainstream.  In due time, persistence will pay off, and you’ll rise to the top.

Next tutorial: More Advanced Link Building Strategies
Previous tutorial: Basic Link Building Strategies

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.