More Advanced Link Building Strategies

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For those of you who read our Advanced Strategies for Building Incoming Links Tutorial (something we highly recommend), here are a few more link building strategies that you can use to help your site get quality back-links:

1. Subitting your site to online directories
2. Buying abandoned web sites
3. Buying Ads in Ezines and Newsletters
4. Purchasing Links
5. Getting Links from .edu and .gov sites
6. The Affiliate Program as Link Magnet

Buying Abandoned Web Sites
It’s been estimated that nearly half of all small businesses started in the U.S. fail within the first four years. In the brick-and-mortar world this means closing up shop and letting someone else use the real estate, but in the online world those failed businesses can hang around on life-support for years waiting for things to improve.  Many such businesses could be ripe for purchase at rock-bottom prices.  Sure, their (lack-of) profit model might not be enticing, but what about the links they’ve already accumulated?  In terms of initial cash outlay it might be a bit more expensive than other link-building
techniques, but when measured in time savings it could be a bargain.

One of the best ways to find those abandoned sites is to do a search in Google for outdated copyrights, such as: "copyright 2003" + your keywords. Nothing says a site has given up trying like a copyright tag at the bottom of each page that’s two or three or more years old. (Hint: to give your customers the impression you’re up-to-date, current, and still in business, keep yours updated.). Obviously, you can also search for copyright 2000, copyright 2001, or any other year that’s not current.

Other good searches to find abandoned or under performing sites that can be purchased for cheap include temporarily down for maintenance or under construction. Just make sure the domain name hasn’t already expired on the site you’re thinking about purchasing. Once a domain expires, Google wipes the slate clean, thereby reducing to zero the value of any incoming links or PageRank the site may have acquired.
 

Purchasing Links
You can boost your link popularity by purchasing links, but you have to be smart about it.  Unless you’re very link-savvy, avoid buying links from traditional link brokers.  Such brokers typically sell links from sites whose topic is unrelated to yours.  These links tend to be placed in a page template which causes you to get a link from every page on that particular site. This is known as a run-of-site link and is an easy way for search engines to tell that the link was purchased.  It’s actually much better to get a single link from the homepage of a site than it is to get 100 links from every single sub-page of a site. To accomplish this, it’s best to contact the owner of the site directly and offer to pay them to put your link on their homepage or, at least, on one of their high-traffic sub-pages. Remember, you’re not just paying for the link popularity; you’re also paying for the traffic the link will send you.

By the way, you’ll usually have to keep those paid links active for at least 3 or 4 months to really see significant improvement.  It can be relatively expensive, since most search engine optimization efforts will take about 6 months before they begin to bear fruit. This is a game for the patient. One potential upside to buying links is that you may be able to offset some of the cost by selling links from your own page once you’ve attained a high enough PageRank.

Don’t pay for any links lower than a PageRank 3. Although lots of little links won’t necessarily hurt you, you can’t expect them to pack enough link-popularity punch to justify paying for them. One PageRank 7 link (especially if it’s on-topic) can be worth hundreds of PageRank 1 or 2 links (possibly more). In other words, links from low PR sites are rarely, if ever, worth purchasing.

Buying Ads in Ezines and NewslettersSee the following tutorials:

• Article Syndication Tutorial
• Ezine and Newsletter Directories

Getting Links from .edu and .gov sites
See the following tutorials:

• The Value of an .edu and .gov link
• Getting .edu and .gov links

The Affiliate Program as Link Magnet
Starting an affiliate program can also be an excellent way to build incoming links.  As you may know, many affiliate programs use special modified URLs to track which affiliate is responsible for which sales. For example, Amazon has an enormous number of affiliates linking to them with links that look like: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/123456789.  Obviously, each is an incoming link to Amazon.  However, in this case, the link is going to a sub-page that Amazon probably doesn’t care about ranking highly. 
To get better mileage from such an incoming link you might consider redirecting the link to pass PageRank and link equity to your site’s homepage by using the 301 redirect and/or a tool like Mod_Rewrite.

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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.