Yesterday I talked about the importance of inbound links to your website. How they serve as votes for the search engines on how to rank your site. Below I go through 10 activities you can do to build more inbound links.
1. Make friends- This is no different than any other type of networking. Step out and start a conversation, introduce yourself. Once you get to know someone simple ask for a link back and forth, think referral marketing.
2. Article directories- Take some of your blog posts and turn them into full articles. Then submit these to article directories like ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, ArticlesBase.com . Then when others take your great content and retweet repeat and provide a nice inbound link coming back to your site.
3. Press Release directories- This is one step more than the articles and most of them are going to cost you some money. The benefit is that you have the potential to reach an even larger audience. PR directories are the outlet for most major news and change, bloggers and writers come here for the content. Make sure your PR is professional written and optimized for the key words you want to use.
4. Marketing Groups- Find a group of likeminded business owners and work together to build inbound links. Communicate through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and RSS. When someone in the group post an article help spread the word by digging, bookmarking it through social media bookmarker delicious.com, tweeting about it, or simply posting a comment on their website.
5. Directory Submissions- Submit your site to as many directories as you can (not all are free). You can do a simple search in Google for “Your Business Industry Directory” Make sure these directories don’t have Do not Follow Links, if you don’t know what that means click here.
6. Great content- There is no substitute for this, focus on this and everyone thing else will fall into place. The better your content the more people are going to want to spread the work (I.E. link to you).
7. Guest blogging: There is a blog for every little niche and every industry type. Just do a simple Google search, find a great blog and start following. Once you become a part of the community ask the blog owner if he minds if you post an article on their site. Chances are they would be thrilled.
8. Make Comments: Now first it’s important to not just spam your website on someone else’s blog, that’s just rude. Make sure the link is relevant, link back to a previous article on a similar topic for example.
9. Forums- Just like blogs, there are forums on every niche and interest. Find a great forum and become an active member. In your signature place a link to your website.
10. Keep working- Again, this is not a onetime activity but an ongoing process.
This list might seem a bit overwhelming, but challenge yourself to do a little bit every day. If you tackle all of these at once you’re bound to get burned out. Print it off and try to use a different method every day or so until it just become habit.
Best Regards,
P.S. I am currently in the works of building a networking group to help promote each other’s business online. If you are interested contact me and let me know.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I followed your link from the post you made at hubspot. Link building is definitely time consuming.
My advice for the fledglings though is get your site fleshed out and make sure everything works before you go getting everyone to visit your site. First impressions are everything! Any time I tweak one of my pages I try to test all of my links to make sure everything works 100%.
It seems like it takes as much time to build links as it does create content , Maybe more. Whatever happened to build it and they will come??!! I think it is good to find some networks of like-minded peope and invest time getting to be part of them. Then they will come.
Link building can be insanly time consuming. Thats why most business pay someone to do it for them. Build it and they will come… some degree your right but you got to get out there and do some link building to get found in the first place.