Linking Makes the World Go Round

Linking is a delicate art, and one that determines how far your reach is. Are Your Links Heard Round the World?

Don’t be taken in by ‘gurus’ offering sure-fire linking. When in dire straits, hire an SEO firm to provide you with a complete link building package based on proven methods and results rather than jumping on the bandwagon and following the lemmings off of the cliff.

Use incentives to get people to link to you. Ask folks to follow you on Tweet about you or Fan you on Facebook or blog about you in return for a t-shirt. You’ll be amazed at all the high quality links
You can get (be careful to frame your promotion in the form of a contest or a free giveaway to keep it from looking like you are paying for links!)

Prioritize, easy links are tempting, but the hard ones are well worth the effort! If you can make yourself of interest to someone in the media and get a good link, that is noteworthy; so are authority links from .gov or .org sites, so try to find something relevant and link worthy. A well known article writer had her article linked to by the CDC for an excellent comprehensive overview of the H1N1 virus. Imagine that!

Also pursue submission based links – but hire a good copywriter! You can increase the value of those links if you look at the picture beyond temporarily boosting PageRank. Article submissions can lead to a lot of quality, targeted, conversion ready traffic

If you find that links from forum posts in one sector boost you, try signature links from comments in blogs in the same sector. Don’t ignore social media! Some of your best links and traffic can come from these lowly links.

Learn to use graphic media. A simple device that allows you to take pictures and video can be the springboard to YouTube and other video sharing sites, as well as letting you add value to submissions on the web. You can get valuable link backs from videos, pictures, audio such as web casts or pod casts, and other forms of graphic media.

Press releases are a great way to garner valuable links as long as each release is truly valuable and not just a report on how your office switched from A4 paper to A6 paper. Use press releases judiciously and you will slowly build a following in your niche. Create a white paper and issue a press release about it, or do an independent study for valuable information.

Once again (because this is important) don’t be cheap. It will cost you more money in the long run, as it takes ten times the amount of shoddy work to achieve the same amount of results as smaller campaign run by a professional link building service.

Hire reputable SEO firms, not gurus, and use high quality copywriters instead of depending on $10 articles that are keyword stuffed and bring no real value. Invest in keyword research, and enable your site to appear high up on the SERPs through proven methods instead of fly by night schemes.