Take the Chore Out of Link Building
How much are your links worth? How much did you used to pay and how much do you currently pay? How much will you continue to pay per link? How many links do you have? How many do you need? Are you getting a good return on your investment? Eliminate the cost per link, invest in content and get better returns from link building and see how others will do a majority of the work for you. Link building is tricky business and, if done properly, can mean big business. If done improperly, you can lose face and your rankings.
Link building is expensive and there is no way around it. In order for your web site to be considered an authority online you must have links and lots of them. Just like anything else there are automated ways of getting links, there are companies you can pay to get your links, you can buy individual links, or you can spend time negotiating linking exchanges yourself. There is a right way, a wrong way, and the sleazy way.
Links are a tricky part of site optimization because you can have hundreds of them and only a low percentage offers any value. Many link building service providers bank on your lack of understanding with this issue and are able to easily get links for you, however, they charge you a premium and the links are likely causing more harm than good. Be sure you can trust your SEO to provide quality links and ask them to show you the value.
Telling the difference between a good link and a bad link is complicated and technical. Every site is different and handles linking in a different way. There are many online programs such as a blog that can be used for community interaction and discussion. They may allow an opportunity in the comment for linking, but normally not the kind of value you’re looking for. If you understand a little bit of HTML, view the source of the page in question and locate your link. Here’s a tip: If you see rel=nofollow in the <a> tag of your link, then search engines are unable to follow the link and therefore unable to give you any equity from the link.
There are other techniques employed which are harder to detect where javascript is placed in the <a> tag of your link, which also prohibits search engines. They may contain something like an “onclick” event, which does the linking and is also not followed by search engines. If the search engines don’t follow the link, the only benefit it provides is whatever traffic frequents that page and the percentage of traffic clicking on the link.
So, how do you know if your link is the good kind of link, if you aren’t very technical? You could always email me at stacy@edit-x.com or you can check your sites link index in various search engines to see if it shows up. This can be done by putting “link:www.yourdomainname.com” in the search engine query box. Yahoo is the best for this purpose as this will show you all of the sites linking to your site and the location of the link. This can take time depending on how many links you have, as you may have to sift through several pages to find or not find the link in question.
By now we have likely all subscribed to a link building service or paid for links, some good and some bad. We all get the emails from off-shore development or SEO companies offering a service to get you links of varying Page Ranks and for X dollars per link. Either that or your SEO company offers the service through some automated software and charges you monthly. We get our link reports and feel link progress is being made. Well it is not. In fact, this type of link building is doing more harm than good.
These techniques often have short term affects, if any at all. They lack stickiness, which means they often don’t last more than a few days to a couple months. A true link would be around forever or as long as the community or web site exists. Off-shore companies often employ persons who lack the understanding of your spoken language and/or the language of your community, in which case cannot effectively contribute a meaningful comment. This leads to a spammy looking link to your site and the links or posts containing the links are often reported and removed within hours. The ones that stick are put into a report, you are billed, and then they are likely removed within months, as the administrators may have limited time for moderation. It’s a numbers game. They submit 50 to get 10 to get paid, to make you feel like you’re getting value and repeat. Automated software works in much the same way, only they have a tendency to create highly uniform links, which are detectable by search engines and can actually lower your rankings. Plenty of software claim to allow for random link generation. Don’t be fooled. If it sounds too good to be true, then it is. If it were this easy, I wouldn’t be writing this post.
Real link building is hard work and requires knowledge about your industry, products, and services in order to be able to contribute meaningful interaction in the site or community where the link will be obtained. Be sure your link building provider has invested the time to learn about your business and can speak at an educated level to represent your company for community involvement.
Link building and community involvement are great and no doubt, if executed professionally, will embed your web site into the audiences that are looking for your products and services. There is another way to obtain links which pushes you closer to becoming the authority, has a longer lasting viral effect, and contributes to your web sites growth and allows your web site to become a true asset to your community. All of this for roughly the same cost of more traditional link building.
Calculate how much money you have spent on Link Building, thus far. 20 links of varying PR at an average of $20 will cost you $400. This example is likely small for many of you, but $400 is a lot of money especially when you consider copy writing costs or potentially saving that money and writing a bit of content yourself --you’re the expert, right? Your expense is now time that is invested into your website, instead of others. You are the expert, right, don’t forget that transferring the knowledge to the copy writer takes time.
If you were to write one decent blog post or one decent article related to your industry, it is likely to contain many of the keywords you are targeting. If you write this content to be informative, catchy, entertaining, yet educational, you will notice a whole new type of link building, which will get you more bang for your buck. This one article has the potential to be linked to from many users who found your article useful and want to share it with others. To get 20 links on an article of this caliber would be a simple thing and likely generate more. You would have spent the same, if not less, and contributed something meaningful to your industry or community and are one step closer to building your online persona or identity.
This is often referred to as Link Bait. You’re using your knowledge or expertise to entice others to link to your information and they will do so, because they found it useful and want to share it with others in their community. This is often done with videos, freebies, useful online tools, quizzes, games, and yes, simply content.
Not only is this the good way to build links, you’re not having to go after related sites, track down people, correspond for months, make time consuming posts only to find them removed, negotiate or barter. The links will come to you and they will last a very long time. Other people will do all of the linking for you and that is how they thank you for creating something helpful or useful. One helpful hint here is to be sure to return the favor. If you see others linking to your posts and they have similar meaningful posts, don’t forget to mention their post and link to their sites. You will be amazed to find they might return the favor again.
You can even use a small budget to help get your ideas off of the ground and start linking to your content with pay Per Click advertising, use traditional link building techniques to seed your link bait within related communities. A link to an article of value is a lot less spammy looking that a link to a product, service, or web site homepage.
Link building is a chore, it can be very expensive, whether they have value or not. Create something that has lasting value and you will continue to receive good links month after month with no additional effort. Use the power of numbers and the viral nature of your knowledge, expertise, and written content to increase your good links. Who knows, you might find that you actually enjoy interacting with your community, your customers, potential customers, and search engines.
Quick Tips
- Be weary of purchasing paid links or directory listings
- Be sure, if you subscribe to a link building service, you are getting links of real value
- It’s more time consuming but if you are involved in related communities you can get quality links
- Your best option is to provide unique, quality content that others will want to link to
