Secret Guide to Why Your Site Won’t Rank - Linking
With SEO, there is no silver bullet. There are many moving parts that need to be brought together in order to execute a successful SEO campaign for your site. Continuing my Secret Guide to Why Your Site Won’t Rank series , I wanted to touch on another important aspect of ranking your website—linking.
Linking is by far one of the most important aspects to optimization. Here are the different categories of links and ways you can leverage them to bring link juice to your site:
Community Links
The Community method requires participation on your part. This can include commenting on others’ blogs and connecting via networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. This can also include participating in forums and interacting with others. Community links should be approached as more of a branding effort. While some links may not pass link popularity, it’s the perfect opportunity to display your brand and interact with potential customers.
Social Links
Social links are similar to community links but with an emphasis on bookmarking sites such as Digg, Furl, Reddit and Stumbleupon. Again this does require some type of interaction but it allows you to get your content on quality websites. This method works well if you have something viral or employ linkbait.
Content Links
Article marketing is a very effective method of obtaining links. There has been a huge rise in the popularity of sites such as Ezinearticles and ArticleAlley. Press releases are also included in this category. A service such as PRNewswire or PRWeb can be used to syndicate your press release to numerous news networks.
Paid & Trade
Paid links can include banner ads, paid text links, sponsored listings, etc. This method can be effective, but the higher the quality of the site, the more expensive it can be to purchase links. Traded, or reciprocal links are an option, but it is more effective to obtain non-traded links. Directory submissions are also included in this group. There are a few good paid directories you can use, such as Business.com, BOTW.org and Yahoo Directory.
Competitor Links
This method can be effective but time consuming. You’ll have to gather link data from your main competitors, sort by relevancy and popularity and review each to see if it’s worth soliciting links from them. You then have to email each website individually to request the links.
I hope you’ve been able to gain some good information from these posts and were able to spark thought and creativeness into your linking.
Do you have some other methods you’d like to share? Post a comment!
