I've been thinking it's time for an "old-school" SEOmoz blog post. These are some of the rarer, but occassionally highly effective techniques for rooting out links in a challenging campaign.
#1 - Mentioned without a Link
This one is surprisingly effective. Your goal is to identify sites/pages that already mention your brand/product/service/website but have failed to provide the direct HTML link. Just shoot them a pleasant, personal email and request the link - success rates can be very high. To find these willing linkers, you can use Yahoo!'s advanced search parameters, i.e. "seomoz" -linkdomain:seomoz.org
#2 - Profile Sites
All those "Web 2.0" sites that allow for the creation of profiles with links, from Frappr and Newsvine to MySpace and Yahoo! 360 to Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are goldmines for links. Even those that don't have direct links enabled often allow you to submit sites or show what you've "tagged" or visited.
#3 - Can I Quote You on That?
If there's a particularly strong site in your sector that you desperately want a link from, this tactic can be of occassional use. The idea is to write a news article with some legitimacy and request a quote from the company/individual you want a link from. Once they know you're writing about them, make sure to send them a copy of the press release or story once it hits and let them know they're welcome to copy portions of the article for their own site if they'd like to reference it (with a link of course).
#4 - Friends & Family
I'm always shocked at how few people send a blast email out to their friends and family requesting links. You're guaranteed near 100% conversion rates for those folks who do have websites or blogs and it's a natural way of making connections - after all, these are the same people who'd recommend you at a party to their friends, so why not ask for the equivalent online.
#5 - Think Local
Sites from Citysearch & Yellow Pages to Google Maps (though that link doesn't count) provide global, local links if you sign up with them, but in nearly every mid-large metropolitan area, there are literally hundreds of directories and lists of local companies in every possible category. Oftentimes they're free and even when they aren't, the prices to be listed are fairly inexpensive. Try searches like seattle inurl:directory or "new york" intitle:marketing intitle:firms - obviously, it helps to get creative with your searches, but with so much opporunity, why wouldn't you?
Any "rare" link building tips you'd like to share?
Taking A Nice Approach With Image Thieves" When you discover that another webmaster has stolen one of your images you can call to cuss him out or write him a nice note informing him of his infraction and offering permission to use the image in exchange for a credit link to your website.
If you run an article directory or media outlet online, collect email address for web sites that are mentioned in your articles. For instance, when I was doing SEO for Associated Content – www.associatedcontent.com - one of the best link-building tactics I used was to send out “Local Top Ten” article requests to our authors. After receiving a hundred or so articles, each discussing ten small businesses (most of which had web sites), I would find the business’ web site, put the email address into an Excel file and run off a mail merge that said something like:
Dear ((contact name))
This is a courtesy email to inform you that someone has written about ((Business Name))) on Associated Content, a new media outlet for the people, by the people. Your business is mentioned in an article titled: ((Article Title)) . Please point your browser to: ((article URL)).
Feel free to link to this article from your “News” or “Media” section, or send it out in your next newsletter. For your convenience, I have provided the html link code below:
((insert link with title as anchor text))
Kind regards,
Everett Sizemore
- - - - This was our #1 strategic link-building initiative and was a big help in building our more than 120,000 incoming links.
Not only is it a good idea to take it easy on image thieves, it is a good idea to encourage hotlinking. On a web site I used to do consulting for, there was so many people hotlink images. So we just added to HTML and forum code needed to hotlink the images with a live link back to our site. It was a huge success. People are lazy, people will cut and paste.
Also if someone follows a hyperlink directly to a image file, they could just be redirected to a HTML page containing the image.
Sorvoja, giving them the code is a fantastic idea. Thanks!
I will follow and say that this article (along with all the articles on this site) was fantastic. I am very new in the SEO world and will probably become a pro member here because of the great input. Nothing like starting on page 4 of google...just to be top with my domain name.
Some interesting tips here, especially #3 - that's pretty smart!
Awesome article
The search parameter mentioned on #1 doesn´t seem to work, any ideas how to do it otherwise?
I am also very interested in what Chris Lang says about social bookmarking sites, it makes sense but then again some people are generating great results by purely submitting to social bookmarking sites regardless of pick up / digg up.
Any ideas on this?
Great share. I liked tactic #3 ..lol.. makes so much sense to do this and your are almost certain a link back. Play on ego's of companies and company owners by writing about them ;-) Nice.
Another social marketing strategy is to use social bookmarking sites to create backlinks to your site.I have found 15 sites so far that Google will follow back to your site and return a backlink in Google results.However, think about this: If Digg has 5 million users and the average number of posts, from the Digg top 100 to the user who no longer participates is 1 post per day, that is 5 million posts.
It curently takes 50+ Diggs for Google to see it as a backlink of any value and that number goes up the more competition there is for the term.
How can you possibly expect that Google will see your 1 link in Digg in 5 million others as a backlink to your site. In fact if you submit your site to Digg and no one else Diggs it, I have come to feel that is a negative indicator in Google’s eyes. The worst thing you can do is submit your Digg posts yourself and then get no Diggs.One of my friends on Social Marketing Central wrote an article that went hot on the Internet. He got like 1500 visitors in a few days and 80 comments. The bad news is that he only got 18 Diggs. Now tell me this: Don’t you think that Google, that has access to the popularity of posts on Digg just like we do, would not see 1500 visitors and 18 Diggs a negative indicator of this blog and the blog post itself?
Google know how many visitors we get, we tell them with Google Analytics. Have you see the new Site Trends today?
I can easily get 100 to 200 Diggs for any article I want in Digg in 2 days. I do that through my own strategies and participation.So social bookmarking if done wrong can actually hurt you. Social marketing is about being social, so be social on social bookmarking sites, don’t just submit you own content and expect that this will bring you results.
I swear Rand, sometimes i think you and I share the same brain. I was just writing about this (internally) this morning. Some additions to consider: How to boost link juice (using keywords, "importance" & topic between linking pages), and what may demote link juice (redirects, reciprocal linking, etc).
Nice tricks ! I took the liberty to translate it into french : Cinq tactiques de creation de liens ... (with a link of course)
Rand #1 and #3 did it for me. Good post. Thanks.
Nice post Rand, the first one is very nice. Quite a while ago I used it and found some very nice articles that mentioned my site but forgot to add in a link, so after a friendly email they did.
Anybody know how to get rid of/block those directory site links that are obviously just scraping the DMOZ listings? I just noticed that I have a ton of those unwanted inbound links to my site.
That can't be good for my site's rep...
I really doubt if any search engine is going to pennalize you because some Dmoz scraper links to your website. At worst, they will just ignore the link. At best, you might get some link juice from the ones they haven't busted yet. Either way, I wouldn't worry about it.
But I would be very interested to hear what Rand has to say about this.