Link Building Strategies: Increase Links to Your Web Site

Directories

Large directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! Directories may not drive major traffic to your site, but they can help in making sure that your site is found by the search engines faster. Niche directories related to your field, or directories that rank for keywords that you want to rank for, should also be considered. You can use a free tool like SoloSEO to find directories that are relevant to your niche or keyword.

Press Releases

There's the regular process of submitting press releases to paid distribution channels, then there's the SEO process of distributing to paid distribution sites. Partnered with a pitching strategy, the paid distribution sites are great for getting media attention, but it's the free distribution sites that will help you earn some backlinks. While a paid distribution channel, PRWeb also offers an SEO Package that will get you backlinks. If you regularly submit press releases to the paid channels, take a few minutes each month to also distribute them to the free press release distribution sites.

Article Syndication

Article marketing can consist of submitting articles to directories, social media sites, or even guest blogging or writing an exclusive feature article for another site. By submitting articles to a variety of sites, you expand your traffic base and receive backlinks from relevant sites. Sites like Ezine Articles and Hub Pages are great when you have unique content to distribute, but also consider re-writing one of your popular blog posts and submitting to a site like Unique Article Wizard. Your article will be distributed to over 500+ sites depending on the topic, and a large percentage of those sites will give you a one-way link back.

Profile Creation

It seems simple enough, but creating social media profiles can be a quick way to earn backlinks. Some of the social media sites will give you a dofollow backlink to your site, while others aren't so generous, although the traffic you get might still be worth it. Check out sites like KnowEm for an extensive list of social media sites that allow profile creation.

Blog and Forum Commenting

Finding a blog that will follow your comment is a dime a dozen, but blog commenting is still a great way to receive links, especially if you are commenting on relevant sites. While a software blogger commenting on a food site may not make sense, commenting on blogs in your industry does. Forums also generally follow backlinks via the signature field and are a great way to earn additional links.

Reciprocal Links

While reciprocal links are frowned upon, they can still make up a small portion of your link building strategy - just don't depend on it for your entire link building strategy. You can get reciprocal links from vendors and partners that you do business with, friends and family with web sites, directories and sites that offer a reciprocal exchange, or by emailing sites you'd like to appear on, asking them for a reciprocal link. Try a tool like Link Assistant to help find reciprocal linking partners and to monitor your link popularity over time.

Emailing Relevant Sites

If you think your web site might be relevant to another web sites target market, email the webmaster of the site explaining who you are, what your request is, and how it would benefit them. Don't send blanket emails though - make sure to thoroughly research the website, find out their needs, and then pitch accordingly.

Link Bait

Similar to article marketing, link bait consists of writing an article or blog, but instead of submitting to a variety of sites, you'll keep this on your own web site. With link bait, you're looking to write an article that will spike the interest of your industry peers, social media sites, or verticals that you're interested in entering. Link bait articles aren't always planned - a blog post that took you 10 minutes to write may end up driving thousands of visitors to your web site, while a post that took you hours of research and time may not get a single view. Posts that tend to get the most links and views offer a different viewpoint to a common issue or problem, describe how to do something (a 101 posts of sorts), are top 10 (or 7, 6, 3%u2026) posts or roundups of a popular topic, consist of breaking news or trends, or even just supply a picture, humor, or thought on something that is unique to your industry. You can also use a tool like Bookmarking Demon to bookmark your site or post on hundreds of sites automatically, creating both backlinks from the social media sites and targeted traffic if the post goes viral.

• 101 Link Building Tips from SEOBook


• Juicy Link Finder from SEOMoz

1. Yahoo Site Explorer

What it is: Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search, but it also lets you explore the links that are pointing to any URL. Use it to determine how many back links your own site has, or to research the back links of your competitors. I use Yahoo Site Explorer on almost a daily basis to find new links that my competitors have already found.

How to use it: Type in the URL of your web site or the URL of your competitors web site. By typing in your competitors web site and clicking on "inlinks," you can explore web sites that are willing to link to a relevant site and therefore may link to you.

2. SoloSEO

What it is: SoloSEO is an easy and quick way to run multiple link operator searches without having to know the link operator codes. Type in a keyword and SoloSEO will come up with a list of web sites that rank, or are relevant, to that keyword, and that allow you to submit your link.

How to use it: Type in a keyword and click on any on the numerous options that appear: add/submit, directories, and blogs and forums. Find directories that are relevant to your keyword, forums that rank for your keyword that you can post to, and blogs that you can either guest blog or comment on. Try different variations of keywords to get the most out of your search. For help finding additional keywords, use a tool like Google Keyword External or SEOBook.

3. Majestic SEO

What it is: Majestic SEO is a dashboard tool with similar features to those of Google Webmaster, but with one nice tool that allows you to track your link building progress month over month.

How to use it: As always, make sure you have a Google Webmaster account set up. Google Webmaster is a convenient way to find out which links are incoming, any crawl problems, and how often your site is crawled and indexed. Then, set up a Majestic SEO account. I use Majestic SEO on top of my basic link building spreadsheet. The spreadsheet tells me month over month how many links I have, that way I can track the progress, but Majestic SEO will show you a quick graph of your efforts. For those needing a visual, this graph will let you know how much effort you or your link building team is actually putting in, and you may also be able to pin point specific efforts that resulted in greater back links, such as a blog post or article marketing effort.

4. SEOPro

What it is: Similar to Yahoo Site Explorer, SEOPro's Link Checker Tool allows you to type in an URL and explore all of the sites that link back to that site. There's a few reasons why figuring out who links to your competitors is important: you can find out what anchor text your competitor is using, therefore figuring out what keywords they are targeting, how many high Page Rank sites are linking to them (this will let you know how easy it will be to beat your competitor in the rankings), and if your competitor has a link building strategy. If all of the links pointing to your competitor are to link bait posts, you can assume that your competitor has a great blogger. If your competitor is pursuing article marketing, directory, and blog commenting as their link building strategy, it will be easier to replicate their efforts.

How to use it: Type in the URL of your web site or your competitors web site, then all of the back links, including the Homepage Page Rank, Page Rank of link, whether the site is nofollow or dofollow, and the anchor text used will appear. This tool is great for finding out quality information fast - if you see that your competitor has 6 links pointing to them that are a PR of 5, you can assume that you'll need a minimum of 7 PR 5 links pointing to your site to outrank your competitor. Keep in mind that the anchor text used, PR of your own site, and total number of links as well as their PR will also play a part in where you rank, but that's a good start.

5. SEOMoz Linkscape

What it is: SEOMoz has a few tools that I use regularly, including the back link analysis tool, term target, and term extractor (great for figuring out which keywords your competitor is targeting on any specific page), but they are best known for their Linkscape tool. Linkscape is a more detailed version of Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOPro, allowing you to really analyze the back links, anchor text, and Page Rank of your competitors.

How to use it: To run a detailed report, you'll have to have a subscription to SEOMoz, which starts at $79. The cost is worth it if you are serious about your SEO efforts and have a link building strategy in place, but if you're a fair-weather SEO, then use the free version of Yahoo Site Explorer or SEOPro. You'll run a report and get an Excel export that you can use to target new links and take down your competitors.

6. SEOBook

What it is: SEOBook and SEOMoz are my #1 stops when I have an SEO question. SEOBook also has a free toolbar plugin that you can run with FireFox. The toolbar includes access to a free Rank Checker tool, compete.com/backlink/directory statistics, and a site info pop up that analyzes a sites statistics, including number of .gov and .edu links, social media profiles, and domain age.

How to use it: I use SEOBook's tools to find out where my site is ranking for a number of keywords, the toolbar to figure out the basics such as domain age and compete score of my competitors, and the web directories review to figure out which directories are worth the cost.

7. Buzzstream

What it is: A nice online dashboard that lets you note possible links and keep track of your link relationships.

How to use it: I've used an Excel spreadsheet in the past to track my link building, keeping note of the URL, whether a link was added, and any special notes. Buzzstream is great for those times when you're looking at a competitors links or found a ton of possible link partners but don't have time to contact them right now. Add a bookmarklet to your browser and save any links to your Buzzstream dashboard. That way, when you have a few minutes to contact link partners, you already have a list to work from. You can also keep track of the relationship stage (initial contact/verified/etc).

8. Shoemoney Tools

What it is: Back link Analyzer, Back links finder, keyword density tool, most linked, outgoing links%u2026a ton of tools wrapped into one dashboard.

How to use it: I use Shoemoney Tool's mostly for the PPC tools (Ad Generator, Ad Manager, Keyword Manager, Keyword Grabber [find out what keywords your competitors are targeting using PPC]), but the SEO tools are amazing for link building and competitive analysis. Using the "Most linked" tool, find out which page on your competitors site is linked to most (from there you can come up with something similar, or better), or use the outgoing links tracker to find out if your competitor is participating in a reciprocal links trader, or whether a site is generous linking out (or if it will take a bit of work to get a link from them).

9. Ninja Affiliate

What it is: I'm a fan of Ninja Affiliate for a few reasons. I originally bought it as a way to cloak/shorten links, but the nice thing about Ninja Affiliate is that it also lets me track how many impressions a link gets, how many people click on it, and the overall conversion rate.

How to use it: If you're using article marketing or building links using social media, you can cloak the links, place them on another site, then track how many impressions or clicks they get. While analytics can tell you which sites are referring traffic to you, you can test links on sites such as Hub Pages or Squidoo to see how much traffic those pages are actually getting, or even twitter to see how many times someone looks at your profile.

Lotus SEO


What it is: Ever want to hire an SEO to tell you exactly what you need to do, but can't afford it right now? Lotus Jump is like hiring a link builder or SEO Consultant who will find all the sites you need, give you actionable tasks to complete, and then it's up to you to actually execute those tasks.


How to use it: Type in the keyword(s) you are trying to target and Lotus Jump SEO will find relevant sites for you to create profiles or links on, increasing the number of inbound links to your web site. Tasks include:


Social Media Tasks: A list of relevant social media profiles is created. Lotus directs you to relevant sites to create new links and increase your online exposure


Q&A Tasks: Get pinged whenever a relevant question is asked on a site like Yahoo Answers, then go directly to the site and answer the question, dropping a link to your site.


Buzz Tasks: Whenever your keyword is mentioned, Lotus will ping you to go to that site and either comment, respond, or note.
Content Generation Tasks: Whenever a content opportunity is available, such as guest blogging or wiring an article on a site like Hub Pages, you'll also be pinged.


Competitive Back link Tasks: This is the best part of the tool - LotusJump will take your top three keyword phrases and find out which websites are your top competitors for those terms. Then, LotusJump will determine where these competing websites are getting their links from, and create tasks for you to procure links from those places too! This helps you discover new linkbuilding opportunities and maintain a competitive edge.


Directory Submission Tasks: LotusJump also populates your account with tasks to submit your site to a number of online directories, both free and paid. Since some directories are more relevant than others, LotusJump allows you to submit to the ones you like, and pass on the ones you don't. Directory submissions are simply part of a diversified link building strategy that LotusJump provides for you.



Visit Lotus SEO.