It’s becoming more evident nowadays that our virtual friends are of more importance then our “real life friends”. Well maybe not in a literal fashion, but quite evident when seeking friendly links. It is understandable that for the foreseeable future link building will remain the most important element to increasing your page rank. The almighty Google algorithm, as mysterious as it may be, has remained constant throughout the first ten years of the new milenium and there is no reason to think that recent sales of Yahoo or releases of Bing will have as great, if any, effect on that formula.
No, that doesn’t mean go out and hit up your local link farm for 200,000 links; that is sure to penalize your site and drop you to the right of the pagination. And it certainly does not mean that writing key word and key phrase rich content will become obsolete. You can forget about it. Keep typing until your eyes bleed because content will always be the other key factor to organic search results. So what do you need to know about getting those important links to your site? Here’s a list below:
- Build a Top Ten List (wow – that’s just what I did!) Social Media is all too important to ignore and people love reading Top 10 lists way more then they do long paragraph ridden articles. Maybe it’s the numbers or the bullets, but be sure to put them in there with a big title of “TOP 10″ and you’ll be set.
- Digg It! Be certain to include ways for your readers to share your top 10 lists on their facebook page or to digg it. Del.ico.us is an important site and a wonderful way to get your site bookmarked.
- Stop the Press – So you’ve got all this great content you just wrote and you posted it on your site. Make sure your release that content on a well written press release in HTML and PDF versions. Submit these releases to industry news sites, eZineArticles.com, iSnare and many other popular syndicates.
- Get Some Friends – And I don’t mean facebook friends. We’ve all got enough of those already. Get to know other web masters within your related industry, trade links as well as content. A well anchored text link that was placed by a human being is worth it’s weight in gold.
- Directory Submission – There is a difference between a directory (such as DMOZ) and link farms. Directory good, Link Farm bad. Good web master. Spend some quality time searching your industry to find significant directories to post within. Free links are agood and sometimes spending a few dollars is well worth it.
- Social, everybody drinks! Make use of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. Recently I’ve found a lot of success with MerchantCircle. Spend a little time with getting some connections and you’ll get some much needed organic links.
- Free, free, free – Craigslist is your friend, use him. Also Yahoo Answers and Google Groups. A great to post your links when and where ever you want is on these (and others like it) sites. I have established entire campaigns with great success around these type of postings.
- Sign on the Dotted Line – Make use of that pretty signature that you spent half of the day last Friday creating while the boss was in a meeting. Put your all important links with that signature and post away on related forums and blogs. DOn’t be an annoyance but do contribute.
- Start All Over – Got another site, domain or hosting account? Well you better be sure that you are linking between all of your sites. YOu’ve got the domain and hosting account. Might as well take advantage of it.
- Powered by You! Design templates for OS applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and add your company name and web link in the footer. Make certain your application works though.
