Link Building Tips SEOs Don’t Share With You
With all the link-building advice we find scattered across the SEO community, you’d think every possible idea has been tried, shared, and burned out. Truth be told, I see new link building opportunities every day that have not been exploited by the SEO community. Of course, search engine optimization and link building are two different things. It’s a very sad statement about this industry that most people who claim to be search engine optimization specialists actually spend a large part of their time trying to obtain links. If your job just requires you to obtain links, there is no shame in that, but you should hope and pray that someone is attending to the actual search engine optimization while you’re out getting the links.
You can combine link building with keyword research. In fact, you can combine link building, keyword research, and query building pretty easily. After all, if the only useful keywords you find are already highly optimized and competitive, it doesn’t do you much good to know that people search with those highly optimized and competitive keywords. Your chances of breaking into a competitive query space are very slim if you’re still a Keyword Padawan.
The Semantic Technique
The best thing you can do is take your keyword research offline. Stop using the Internet to do your Internet research. Instead, turn to the offline world and flex your old-fashioned promotional muscles to do some semantic testing.
Here is a basic semantic test that anyone can do with very little effort. It helps you with your keyword research, it helps you build links, and it helps you build a new query space. The basic method has always worked for me, but it’s not magic. This is a very flexible recipe, so you can make some substitutions if you want to be creative.
Step 1: Think of something newsworthy or funny that is connected with your Web site or business. Newsworthy and funny together are great, but you’re most likely stumped to think of anything that qualifies as either. You’re more likely to think of something cute, light-hearted, or maybe just very slightly twisted in a harmless, politically correct way.
Step 2: Write it down in very nice, grammatically correct, spell-checked language. Rewrite it. Set it aside for 2 days and then rewrite it again. Be concise, informative, and entertaining.
Step 3: Find a picture or graphic that goes well with your entertaining anecdote about your business or Web site.
Step 4: Print up a little flyer, postcard, menu insert, or other piece of paper that includes your entertaining anecdote, picture or graphic, the URL of your Web site, and the clear and explicit instruction to “search for X Y and Z to find URL”. If it looks goofy, fiddle with the layout until it looks nice and semi-professional (for an amateur).
Step 5: Now print 25-50 copies and distribute them to community bulletin boards, supermarket bulletin boards, church bulletin boards, restaurant “Free take one” tables, etc.
Step 6: Search for blogs that refer to your little giveaway.
How likely is this technique to help you build links? As presented, it has about as much chance of success as you have of walking on water. But practice makes perfect (and any film industry stunt person will tell you that walking on water is the easy part — making it look miraculous is the hard part).
What you’re doing is drawing people’s attention to your creativity. You have, theoretically, expressed that creativity on your Web site. You share some of that creativity in offline venues where people are not distracted by other Web site promoters vying for everyone’s attention. Offline venues include television, radio, packaging, brochures, business cards, handouts on the street, sandwich board signs, placards you hold on a stick, napkins you distribute at picnics, etc.
You show people that you can be both informative and interesting. You MUST be informative and you HAVE to be entertaining. Otherwise they won’t care about your message.
You tell people they can learn more by searching for your keywords (that you dominate) or by going to your Web site.
Repeating the exercise 100 times is more effective than doing it once. It gives you opportunities to change out the keywords you’re promoting. People respond to different choices of words in different ways. That’s the whole point of this type of test: to find out which marketing message evokes the best reactions.
It takes less time to promote a site offline than it does to obtain links. You can pay for the offline promotion or not. If you leave out any one critical piece of information you may still get some traffic but you do diminish the quality of the message.
Self-Sponsorsed Off-web links
Have you ever seen a car moving down the road that tells you to visit some Web site? It’s cheesy but it works. Again, you’re promoting yourself in a venue where there is little competition.
But self-promotion doesn’t have to consist of spray-painting your truck with a sales pitch and a URL. You can sponsor yourself in ways that most SEOs don’t think about.
For example, do you participate in friendly neighborhood (or school) sports events? Do you wear t-shirts or other brandable clothing? Have you ever put your Web site’s name, tagline, and URL on your clothing? Try it. It makes a great conversation piece.
Do you put stickers on your luggage, computer, or lunch box? Have you considered using stickers that include your Web site name, tagline, and URL? Yeah, that creepy guy across the aisle may be checking them out, but maybe he’s only doing so because you gave him something to read on the long commute.
Do you have a local community center that is in need of books, videos, and/or DvDs? Maybe they’ll accept some donations that just happen to have those informative stickers on them (don’t be greedy or gauche — the stickers should be discretely placed on the inside of the jacket, etc.). You never know.
Do you have a local community clinic that has the rattiest magazines in town? Donate some recent magazines to them with those stickers on the cover or table of contents page (remember that magazine covers tend to fall off). People may visit your site.
Be sure you rank first for your tagline.
Self-sponsored on-web links
You know, as much time as people spend writing emails asking for links, they could just as easily be writing blog posts that create their own links. If you write 10 link emails a week, you could instead be creating a pretty interesting blog that draws in traffic. And you don’t have to use every post to link to your own site (but you could if you wanted to).
If you can create a blog, you can create a forum. If you can create a forum, you can use it to link to your own site.
Blogs and forums produce RSS feeds and ping blog search services. People do visit new blogs and forums every day. You can write some pretty inarticulate stuff and someone is still likely to read it. More importantly, if you can discipline yourself to write in patient, informative terms then you can help people learn to search for your content in any way they are likely to find it.
It can be as simple as embedding a link to SEO theory in a query on Live.com.
RSS feeds can be powerful things, if you know how to use them. They will distribute your links in ways you never could have imagined. You can reach a lot of readers quickly with the right RSS feed. And it can be a self-sponsoring feed.
As with other techniques I’ve discussed, you can use your RSS feeds to promote your Web site name, tagline, URL, and queries for which you rank well. You don’t have to worry about paying people money, whether links pass value, or what your rankings are.
Generally speaking, if you successfully promote the queries for which your sites rank first, you don’t really need to build links at all.
And that is in many cases better link building advice than you’ll find on most SEO blogs and forums.
But like I said: Walking on water is the easy part. Making it look miraculous is the hard part. You don’t need a miracle if you’re stuck for link building ideas. You just need to stop thinking about links and start thinking about promoting your site.
www.seo-theory.com
published @ September 4, 2008