As I talked about last week, with proper on-site SEO, you massively increase the effect of your linkbuilding campaigns. So I figured a good follow-up post would be about getting more backlinks — enjoy!You may have heard that backlinks are “CRUCIAL” to SEO and ranking in search engines. It’s true — they are. If you really want to maximize your search engine traffic you need a solid backlink strategy that works for you.
So what is a backlink and why are they so important? Backlinks are a simple concept: when another website links to you that link is considered a backlink. Search engines look at backlinks to evaluate how popular a website is and rank them accordingly.
Each backlink is given a certain amount of “juice” based on it’s own reputation, history, and authority in the niche. Backlinks from established and legitimate websites are more effective than low-quality backlinks from websites with no credibility.
With all that said, if you want to rank for competitive keywords, you need backlinks.
Here are 8 ways to get easy backlinks to help rank your website for your target keywords:
Testimonials
You can easily leverage testimonials into backlinking opportunities online. Whenever you buy a new product, service, membership, or anything else online, leave a testimonial. Testimonials will commonly have a link to your website within them to prove the testmonial is real. This will give you a free backlink if the company likes your testimonial and uses it on their website. And — it doesn’t hurt to ask them to put a live link in the testimonial!Pro Tip: Leave honest and real testimonials (they’ll get used more).
Social Bookmarks
How about some free backlinks from high PageRank sites? Social Bookmarking allows you to save your favorite bookmarks online to read later and share with others. (Lucky for us that also gives us a free backlink.)Pro Tip: We use SocialMonkee.com for social bookmarks. It automatically bookmarks your URL to 25 social bookmarking sites for free.
Press Releases
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a public relations expert to run a successful press release. You can have a press release written and distributed to thousands of different news sites and publications without doing any ‘real’ work. I love press releases because you get HIGH quality backlinks and your business gets put in front of readers, not a bad deal! Websites like the New York Times and USA Today can pick up your press release giving you a gem of a backlink (and a ton of free traffic). Though we will say that your press release better be high quality if you want to get on one of those sites!Submitting a press release to all of these news sites manually would be a HUGE hassle. To avoid wasting our time we use a distribution service called PRWeb. PRWeb has an extremely strong track record and come highly recommended from most search engine optimizers.
RSS Directories
All over the Internet there are “RSS Directories” which serve the purpose of letting people explore different blogs/websites on a particular topic. By submitting your RSS feed to these directories your website gets a link back to it.To submit your website to RSS directories automatically we use a program called Fast RSS Submitter. Fast RSS Submitter will submit your RSS feeds to over 100 RSS directories automatically, saving you a lot of time.
Joint Ventures/Partnerships/Co-Branding
If you have any partners or JVs ask them if they will link back to your website. If you think they might be hesitant, just ask if you can do a guest post with a link, it’s hard to turn down free content. And as a double bonus, you get extra traffic back to your site.Wait a sec…a guest post about guest posting? How meta…
Link Bait
Link bait is content that is so useful, high quality, or powerful that people are compelled to share it naturally. If you put up content that people enjoy so much they tweet, like, blog, and comment you can rank for A LOT of keywords. Utilize link bait and structure your content towards your audience, always. If you can do that consistently your fans and readers will do a big chunk of your link building for you.Some examples of great link bait are: top 10 lists/roundups, hot topics, breaking news, and infographics. Honestly, if you’re looking for great examples of linkbait, you don’t need to go much further than IncomeDiary.com. Michael is great at it!
Article Submissions
There’s a myth that goes something like this: “Article marketing is dead.” It really isn’t, but if you want to pass up on great backlinks you can believe that. Article marketing is one of the most effective forms of link building I use every single day. I have websites ranked in the #1 position for their primary keywords JUST from article marketing, so don’t try to tell me it doesn’t work!The key to article marketing is VOLUME. The main argument I hear against article marketing is that only xx% of the links get indexed/counted/etc…which is why you have to do big numbers. (We’re talking about thousands of submissions) Submitting 2 articles isn’t going to rank your website overnight like some miracle cure. Do lots of submissions and see where you’re at – if you didn’t hit number 1 keep going.
Submitting articles is another time sucker, so we use syndication software that does it automatically. For article submissions we use nothing but Article Marketing Robot. This software is amazing and automates the entire submission process for you, all you have to do is put in the information and let it run.
Awards
Holding some type of annual awards can generate a lot of buzz and backlinks for your website. To do this (successfully) you do need SOME level of credibility in your industry, though. Create awards for the best in your industry and give them to the ones that are crushing it. These are usually the most popular and followed people, so you can really leverage their popularity to grow your website. I’ve seen this used very effectively in the fitness industry — people can’t resist sharing with their friends that they have won an award — even if you just made it up on the spot This can do a couple things for you:
- Bring in new readers, fans, and followers (because its fun & different)
- Attract those ‘big name’ winners and potentially get links, tweets, or mentions from them
- Build rapport for your brand/company/website