Incoming links for a website are the best way to build page rank and get more traffic for a site. While link building is important, it’s more important that it’s done the right way, so your hard work gets the credibility it deserves.
Important : To use this guide effectively, don’t try to make all suggestions work for you at the same time. Take a few suggestions and apply them. Once you are comfortable with them, come back and try a few others. Trying a lot of new things at once usually don’t work out well.
Matt Cutts from Google, talks about how building a unique product, offering free services and generating interesting data can usually get you tons of incoming links. But what if your website’s niche is not unique? What if there are a lot of other websites that have more or less the same content as you?
Link baiting is a technique that can get you more links than the competition. Link baiting has been criticized in the past for being a black hat technique and an unethical way of building links. There are ethical ways to link bait as well, and some work very well, but this will be discussed in detail in a future article. Here are some tips to help you get incoming links for your website :
- Don’t hide the fact that you want incoming links. Most webmasters know about the importance of incoming links and will happily link to you if your content is useful to them. It’s a standard practice on this website to ask people to link to our content, if they like it. Hint, hint
- Make something useful. Find a problem and fix it. People have issues with a lot of stuff : some might want to know how to change a motorcycle’s engine oil and others might be looking for some ‘must have’ kitchen appliances. Yahoo Answers is a great place to start because it let’s you list your site as a reference. You might also do this on other forums, and include links to your site in your signature, but be careful to not increase your post count just to have more back links.
- Allow people to re-use your content. You spent a lot of time and effort in writing about something that people want to read. If someone comes along and asks for permission to copy your content, allow them to do so, with a dofollowed link pointing back to your page. Your article can usually be copied without your permission as well. When someone asks for permission, it gives you a chance to get an incoming link. And don’t worry about duplicate content. Usually, search engines would have crawled your site and found original content on your site before they crawl to copied content. Any duplication can easily be detected. If search engines do not crawl your site fast enough, you might want to impose a time limit (usually 72 hours should be enough) to allow other people to copy your content. When search engines detect a link on the copied content back to your site, they automatically assume your content to be original and you receive credit for creating the article.
- Link out to other websites. The whole purpose of link building is to help websites get connected to each other. So if you wish to get incoming links from other websites, let them see that you are also generous with outgoing links. Make sure the link is dofollowed. If other sites link to you, check if their link has the nofollow attribute. Do not take this to heart though. We’ve all seen posts with almost no original content but with lots of links to great articles. Would you link to such a page?
- Get featured. It takes a lot of effort to get featured on a popular site, but it’s worth the effort. An article from this site got featured on the front page of ScriptandStyle.com and as a result, generated much more traffic than an 11 day old website can expect. We also got a dofollowed link from the front page of ScriptandStyle.com.
- Become an authority website : At Webmaster Blog, we believe in linking to reputable sites with concrete information. A lot of other webmasters would also like to link to websites which command some respect. If your website can publish pages which can be used as industry standard documents, they are more likely to be linked to. Make sure to link your high conversion pages prominently on such pages.
- Write about something controversial : Controversial articles usually get a lot of attention and can be a great source for incoming links. However, many webmasters consider this to be almost a black hat technique of generating links. Writing about controversial topics all the time also makes people lose interest rather quickly so this is best done in moderation. Be careful, controversies can also backfire on your site and DDOS attacks on controversial websites aren’t unheard of.
- Learn how to write well : Learning how to write great articles will greatly increase your link pulling power. Nobody wants to link to poorly written content. Neither do they want to link to your random musings, unless you are very popular in the first place.
- Socialize : Social networks might eat up a lot of your time, usually because you find so much interesting stuff on them that you want to spend your time there. While this will hamper your productivity in the short run, social networks can be a great way to connect with people who share your interests and to promote your website to them. Interested friends will usually link to your website or promote it further into the network on your behalf. Some social networks also allow you link to be seen directly by search engines, thus creating a free linkback to your site. A word of caution : learn how to use a social network before you start promoting your stuff, or you might get banned for spamming before you know it. We will publish articles on how to use some popular social networking sites, so subscribe to our feed for updates.
- Make socializing easy : Visitors aren’t generally going to take the time to logon to their favorite social network and link back to your article, especially when they are required to describe what they liked about your article. Make use of several “sharing” plugins that make it easy to share your content with a single click.
- Publish breaking news. Fast! : If you publish latest news about your niche on your website, make sure you do it at lightning fast speed and then spread the word. If you do this enough, then you will be known as the source for the latest news updates and a lot of the sites from your niche will link to your content.
- Highlight interesting observations : There is a lot of data out there, generally about everything. Take your time to go through the bundles of data and collate that info ready-to-use information. Precise and usable information generally attracts a lot of links and can become an “authority” document fast.
- Run a contest : If you can afford to spend, then run an easy contest with a big prize. Announce the contest much before it’s closing date and publicize it on social networks. Give bonus points to participants who invite a huge number of other participants. The bigger the prize and easier the contest, the more links you can expect from a wide variety of websites. General discussion forums won’t even object if you start a topic just to discuss this, as it gives members a lot to talk about.
- Get media attention : If you do something unique and creative to get media attention, you’ll usually get incoming links from media websites. These are usually high value links not only in terms of Pagerank, but also to establish your website as a credible resource.
- Giving is receiving : Sponsor a high profile event that will generate a lot of media attention. A small sponsorship will also get a link back from the event’s website and usually also from the media covering the event. Charity donations of a sizable amount are also rewarded with linkbacks.
- Bust a myth : It’s interesting how people usually want to know that they were believing in a myth. If you can surface the truth about any widespread belief, you needn’t worry about page rank for a long time to come.
- Limit your spectrum : Don’t make your website about a lot of topics. Gain trust and authority in one topic before branching out on the next. It will be easier for people to link to your site, “to know all about topic xyz”
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