More Off-Page Tactics
Press Releases and Article Syndication
Press releases and article syndication are a great way to gain natural backlinks from keyword-rich pages and increase traffic. If executed properly, these methods can serve as your primary method of increasing your site’s rankings, link equity, traffic and authority.
Writing informative articles for other sites asserts your presence as an industry expert to consumers and industry players. Building your online awareness may result in requests from industry media for interviews, exclusive articles, and other opportunities.
Journalists always need material and current news. Press releases are great to let your industry media outlets know of any important events or advances related to your business. I can personally attest to the large numbers of sales leads generated by coverage due to press releases.
Hiring experienced copywriters or a PR firm works best, as they know how to structure a press release, and which distribution channels garner the greatest coverage. If you want to keep this in-house, I recommend researching the finer points of copywriting and how other companies write their press releases. Use PRWeb or any of the many press release sites.
There are some great places to syndicate articles, including EZineArticles, iSnare, GoArticles and many more. Article syndication works wonderfully in that it encourages webmasters covering your industry to post your articles, as many news sites and bloggers want fresh, unique content.
By placing links in your content or short bio, you gain permanent links from a variety of related sites. Using your keywords in the article title and content (and anchor text of the link) greatly increases the value of the potential backlinks that may occur. These links from sites posting your article are deep and naturally occurring, something the search engines value highly.
Keep your articles informational, original and entertaining. Do not blatantly promote your site; articles are to serve more as an informative resource. Do your research and quote authority sources
Email your articles directly to handpicked sites increases the likelihood of coverage and, thus, high quality links. Find industry news sites and related blogs with high PageRank, Alexa rank, or just high quality content. Add a personal message to each email you send with your release, informing the reader how the article relates to their visitors and why it is newsworthy (make sure it is newsworthy).
Offering to pay for the posting of an article is another method, if you don’t have much luck with simply requests. Paying increases the likelihood of getting a link posted, as finding sufficient sources of revenue to properly support and maintain a quality site can prove difficult for any webmaster.
Trading articles
Trading articles with another webmaster is another method of creating a solid link and gaining fresh content. Write custom-fit articles tailored to a particular site (featuring a particular keyword phrase) and approach the webmaster with the proposition of featuring his writing on your site in return for posting your article. Inside the text create a link to your page with the targeted keyword phrase as your anchor text. Make sure that the site and particular page to feature your article is relevant to your site and article.
Ask for a Link
Simple in concept, asking for a link is one way to develop more natural-appearing links on a small budget. When emailing a webmaster, it pays to be cordial and pay compliments. Follow these steps:
- Discuss the finer points of different elements of their site, explain why you found certain articles or resources interesting and helpful, and anything else that you would say when trying to butter someone up.
- Make clear that you share an interest and knowledge in their topic/industry.
- Begin discussing a related article/resource on your site that their visitors might be interested. Mention how your sites are similar and work on building a level of trust and mutual respect.
- Then state they can link however they please, or they can use the optimized html code that you conveniently placed in the email.
- Mention a method of payment for your “sponsoring” of their site, if you feel you should pay them. Or discuss how you have already added a link to their site and why.
- Finish with a complimenting statement and mention that you appreciate their site and efforts to provide unique, high-quality content for your industry.
Before sending this email, you might want to build a relationship with that person, whether it be through email or phone contact. If you are working on gaining a very important link, the best approach is slow and easy. Let the webmaster know you aren’t just a link-hungry profiteer, but an earnest contributor to the online community.
Use a similar approach to acquiring paid links, paid article postings, content swaps, and any other interactions with webmasters.
Paid Links
While Google is working to discount paid links, there are still many ways to purchase links that provide value to your site, the linking site, and the visitors of both. Paid links are a fact of the online world and will not go away, despite what Google wants. Rather, the smarter webmasters are simply increasing the sophistication of disguising paid links as natural links.
Buying links is not as simple as it was before recent developments in algorithms and filters. At one time, links from any site with high PageRank would pass your site significant amounts of link equity. Now, it requires a personal touch to establish quality links. Otherwise you run the significant risk of wasting time and money building links with minimal value.
Tip: If it is obvious by checking out your backlinks at Yahoo! Site Tracker that you are purchasing links, then you are not doing a good enough job.
To determine the value of a potential link placement, you might want to use these tools: Text Link Ads Link Calculator, page strength tool, or link price calculator. These simply provide estimates, but give a good idea when selecting and pricing paid link partners.
One great way to gain a link from a reputable site is to sponsor sites of 501 C organizations. These nonprofits are considered authority pages and are highly trusted by search engines. Sponsor sites that provide information about your industry. This will greatly increase traffic and the likelihood that your site will be bookmarked and/or linked to from other sites.
Keep it personal – Stick to buying links directly from webmasters, so as to avoid the chance of getting dinged for obvious link buying. This also ensures that the links are placed how you want them.
Blogs
Blogs have been a hot ticket for some time now and are great to gain links from as they are constantly updated (thus visited by humans and spiders often) and archive old content (potential for deep links). Not to mention the amount of traffic your site can receive by being mentioned in a blog post or from a text link. Adding comments on posts can also work, especially if you link back to your site as a reference to add another perspective or unique information to the post’s topic.
To find blogs covering your industry, visit BOTW’s blog directory or Google’s or the many other blog directories online.
How to identify link partners
Search the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) with queries like “keyword phrase + add url” or “keyword phrase + sponsor.” Use this search combination tool, which allows you to combine keyword phrases with others to generate a list of links to the multitude of arrangements of possible search queries.
Myriad Search allows you to compare SERP results from Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and Ask.
- Download and install SEOQuake or SEO for Firefox and you can find out important information on all of your SERP results. This is extremely helpful as it allows you forego the many steps it’d take to find this information for every site ranking well for a keyword.
Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to mine the backlinks of the top ranking sites for your keywords. Or use this C Class backlink analyzer to determine a site’s backlinks that come from unique IP addresses, as links from the same IP address are typically valued less by search engines.
Market Leap has a great link popularity tool that you can use to analyze competitor’s backlinks.
Reciprocal Links
The jury is out on reciprocal links. Some are for, some against, I’m in the middle. Having links out of your site reduces your page’s link equity, something you should hold near and dear to you. At the same time, reciprocal links to related sites and authority sites can also be a good thing. Search engines value sites that act as “hubs” for a given subject.
Reciprocal links can be great traffic providers, especially if you trade links with a popular site. It’s best to trade links with related sites with visitors that fall into your target market.
In general, I don’t think you should be afraid of reciprocal links, but don’t rely totally on them as they don’t really help your site rank higher. Authority sites typically have a good amount of outbound links; however they also typically have hundreds and thousands of pages and even more inbound links. You can use nofollow links if you want to hoard PageRank.
Social Bookmarking & Other New-Aged Nonsense
Some of the big new social sites are gaining serious attention as the new wave of marketing but as this study shows, these sites are not used by people looking for product information or with a strong purchase intent. Some examples are del.icio.us, digg, furl.
However, they can be helpful to get the word out about your site and may lead to many new links. For smaller sites, often articles or posts on such sites rank higher than the site’s themselves. Many bloggers use these sites to find new articles, etc.
I definitely recommend placing bookmark buttons on your website’s articles and informational content. Instead of placing several buttons on your site for the many different bookmarking sites, you can place a single Add This button and you’re good to go.
