Give Me A Break Penguin! Link Builders Are Still Top Dog
Ever since Google released its Penguin update, it seems like SEOs are afraid of building links. Give me a break. High quality links are still the best way to improve your rankings.
Link building is crucial to the success of any blog or website – building links lets Google know your website is worth visiting and adds value to your company. Despite the over-active “SEO Company London” anchor text links still produce more results than any other off-site SEO effort. Link building is something which can be easily and simply accomplished. Sometimes getting links to your site can be as easy as sending a few emails. All you have to do is find people who run websites and ask them for a link (you’ll usually have to trade something for the link.) If this sounds too easy to be true, it’s not. This is a proven method, and it works, but what if you want to produce better than average results? You can be far more inventive and produce better than average results with a few creative link building strategies.
Creative link building can send more traffic to your site, increase your sales and help your site’s SEO. Keep reading to learn some of our favorite link building strategies. Reminder: simply reading about link building isn’t going to help you. I challenge you to apply at least one of these strategies today, and then come back and tell us about it in the comments below.
Use your products as link bait:
Do you sell a really great product? If so, then use it for link bait. Companies that embrace the novelty of their products now rank competitively. Tipp-Ex, for example, created a promotional video series to promote an otherwise boring product. Their videos went viral and have won their YouTube videos 2,679 links from 679 domains.
Find a creative way to present your product. If you make something that people will enjoy sharing; they will. Like this article for example, if you’re having fun, then you should tweet about it
Tweet:
Guest post on other websites:
Guest posting on other websites is a sure-fire way to get great links. You find guest post opportunities really easily by signing up for a blogging community like BLU (blogger linkup). The traditional way to guest post is to target other blogs in your industry. If you want to be really creative, you can target blogs in other industries. For example, sometimes I’ll write a guest post about SEO, and use that to link to one of my clients. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you’re writing to your future customers not to search engines. If you create high-quality content, it will attract people. Get out there and sign up for BLU.
Create an infographic that doesn’t suck
Creating a great infographic is a fantastic way to get links. You can visit Kiss Metrics to review examples of high-quality infographics. Make sure the infographic is lively, fun and informative (and reliable too, of course!) If your infographic doesn’t suck then people will start sharing it and linking to it. There are several blogs dedicated to infographics that you can ask to share your graphic. Check out visual.ly and Kiss Metrics.
Search for Press coverage:
Sign up for Google Alerts. Every time your website or brand is mentioned online, Google will send you an email. When you receive an email, go to the article and make sure it links to you. If there isn’t a link to your website in the article, then you can contact the publisher and ask them to link to you. This won’t always work, (because some online newspapers are living in the 20th century and have policies against linking to “non advertisers”) but when it does, It’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to boost your link graph.
Create an ego-bait blog post:
Ego-bait campaigns are pretty easy to create and can offer big rewards in the way of links. Create a weekly round-up of your favorite articles, or even tweets. Once you’ve gathered your list, write a creative blog post about how each article, or tweet added unique value to your industry. After the blog is published, share it with those people you’ve featured and ask them to tweet about it. Most of them will be more than happy to promote an article that they’ve been featured in and might even link to it.
The key here is to be inventive and keep your quality high. One of the most important elements in link building is relationships. You HAVE to maintain the relationships you’ve built and keep people happy. The happier you make other people, the more likely they are to link to you again! Remember, now you have to go try one of these ideas. Let us know which one was your favorite and how you plan to use it.
