Best Practice Marketing

Link building can be a very cost efficient way of doing marketing on the internet, if it is done right. The most important is to make a strategy that keeps you focus on using the most efficient link building methods.

I have made this article to give myself a shortlist to look at when I make a link building strategy. I hope you can use it as well

Please check for updates in the future.

Name: Directories
Short description: Organized list of web sites by categories.
Direct and targeted traffic: Directories can bring targeted traffic, especially from big and specialized directories.
Value for search engines: You get the biggest value from directories that have a personal evaluation, a high page rank and that are specific for your category. The lowest value is from automated directories that might be considered as “link farms”.
Time requirement: Low
Other: Remember to focus on bringing costumers to your web site from the directories and not only to get a link juice from the directories.
How to do it: Find a list of the biggest directories. Within the directories, search for more specific directories in your category. Make a cost/benefit assessment to find the directories worth the effort. There are many companies specializing in submitting to directories; a few deliver good quality and good value. With your final list of worthy directories you start submitting.

Name: Top Competition
Short description: Get links from the sites that rank high already for target keywords relevant for you.
Direct and targeted traffic: Can give a lot of targeted traffic.
Value for search engines: Very high.
Time requirement: High, but rewarding.
Other: Don’t contact direct competitors.
How to do it: Contact the site owner/webmaster by e-mail, phone or/and letter etc. Suggest them some ways of incorporating your link in their site, but be open to their suggestions. Use all your tactfulness and diplomatic abilities.
You can make it a routine to contact the most likely websites to give you a link in Google top 1000 results, every time you have optimized a page for a keyword phrases.

Name: Link Search
Short description: Use the search engines to find relevant links for your category/keywords.
Direct and targeted traffic: This is a numbers game. Most of the sites will send you 1-2 targeted people per month, but if you have many links it makes it a considerable amount of traffic. Many top ranking sites reports that they sell more to people coming from links than to people coming from the search engines.
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: High
Other: Work organized.
How to do it: It’s possible to use search engines or specialized software. Try to search for: add+url “keyword phrase” , submit+site “keyword phrase”, submit+url “keyword phrase”, add+site “keyword phrase”, add+your+site “keyword phrase”, directory “keyword phrase”, list “keyword phrase”, sites “keyword phrase”. Use your creativity to find other searches combinations to find free, paid, reciprocal links, etc.
NB: We have found many searchers searching for ways to add their URL/URI when we do keyword research. You can get inspired of which keyword phrases to use by buying a keyword report or optimize a webpage for some popular add URL keyword phrases and other webmasters will contact you for link exchanges.

Name: Competitors’ links
Short description: Use your competitors’ link to find sites that will link to you.
Direct and targeted traffic: Yes, if your competitors’ get targeted traffic from their links.
Value for search engines: High. This is half the reason why your competitors’ rank high in the search engines.
Time requirement: Medium. You are using your competitors’ work.
Other: A very used technique, which almost always gives good results.
How to do it: Search for links in Yahoo, Msn, Google, etc. by typing ex. “link:YourDomain.com”(the link command is a little different in the different search engines) follow the links and see if you can get some of these links too.

Name: Writing and Submission of Articles
Short description: Write articles to get visitors and links.
Direct and targeted traffic: You can get a high amount of direct traffic if the article is of good quality and published in the right place.
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: It depends on how good you are to write articles.
Other: Update, rewrite and combine your articles portfolio to be able to publish in more places.
How to do it: Write a good article and submit it to 3rd-party article hosting sites. Choose 3rd-party article hosting sites that have a lot of visitors, potential customers, high page rank, been working for many years, have quality articles and that is specific for the category of your site. Try other 3rd-party article hosting sites if your article is turned down.
Here are some big and popular 3rd-party article hosting sites:
Idea Marketers, Buzzle.com, Go Articles, EzineArticles, AMAzines, Article City, BPubs.com, Business Know-How,
WWIO, About.com, Simply Search 4it, Knowledge Bed, Article Insider.

You can also go direct to a journalist, a relevant site or a site where an article can get you a rewarding link.

There are also writers that that can help you at places like: Odesk, VWorker and Elance

Name: Forums & Online Comments
Short description: Contribute with information and give a link that people can follow to your site.
Direct and targeted traffic: Very high.
Value for search engines: Low
Time requirement: Medium
Other: Remember to keep to the terms of use for the forums you post in.
How to do it: Answer people’s questions and put the link to your website in your signature. Google sometimes includes newsgroups post in the search results. Many people go to newsgroups and forums to get help to their problems. If your product solves a problem, you will not only help one person but also all the other people that are looking to solve the same problem by writing an answer. You will also draw the attention to your product by the people that read the newsgroup or forum. People that read and write in newsgroups and forums have an interest in the subject and is likely to be asked for advice from other people. Most webmasters also look for inspiration in forums and newsgroups; if your website is resourceful they might give you a link.

Name: Comments in blogs
Short description: Comment in other blogs related to your niche.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High, because the search engines sees a relation between the quality of your site and how much you participant in the conversion in your niche.
Time requirement: Medium
Other: Only the most interesting comments get people to follow a link to your site.
How to do it: Make informative, relevant and intelligent comments in blogs.

Name: Blogging
Short description: Make your blog.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Medium
Other: If you have a quality keyword report, you will be able to target what people are searching for and receiving target customers to your business at the same time.
How to do it: A blog is a tool you can use to make keyword target pages, if you can create a community, then people will help you write and it is easy to exchange links with other bloggers, in traditional websites.

Name: Renting Pages from Authority Sites
Short description: Rent a page from a site that the search engines consider authority in your category.
Direct and targeted traffic: Very high
Value for search engines: Very high
Time requirement: Medium
Other: It is possible the rented page can rank very well for your search terms very quickly.
How to do it: Approach an authority site that doesn’t normally host others sites’ content and give them a proposal. Be ready to be very convincing and to get some rejections. If your writing skills are excellent, you will be able to get the pages for free.

Name: Purchasing Online Advertising
Short description: Advertise online.
Direct and targeted traffic: Yes, if you advertise in the right place.
Value for search engines: Low. The ads will most likely look the same and be recognized by the search engines as ads. Remember to look if you are getting a direct link or if you are led around re-directed scripts (like “double click”)
Time requirement: Low
Other: Costs can be high, but can also give a lot of target traffic fast. Be sure to convert the traffic into costumers.
How to do it: Find the best value for money advertising, plan your campaign and monitor your results.

Name: Text Link Brokers
Short description: Buy links from link brokers.
Direct and targeted traffic: Low to high
Value for search engines: Low to high
Time requirement: Low
Other: The market for links is full of schemes. Be 100% sure of what you get, before you close any deals.
How to do it: Find a quality link broker. Make a strategy and monitor the results. If you are aiming to let the links help in the search results, then make sure that it isn’t public known that the website you are buying from is selling links and the bought links don’t have a pattern to make it easy for the search engines to find the links that you have bought.

Name: Buy a review
Short description: Pay to have blogs and websites to write a review.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: People like to research online before they buy online and offline. This is a way to get your product reviewed and paid reviews tend to be positive.
How to do it: If you have a product, software or other things that can be reviewed, then you can give an offer for websites to pay them to make a review. Some websites and blogs offer review for a fixed amount of money. Sponsored Reviews is the biggest site for buying a review.

Name: Tools & services
Short description: Make a service or tool available at your site.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High, if other sites find it so valuable that they will link to you.
Time requirement: Low to high.
Other: Difficult, but with the right tool or service your site can become an authority.
How to do it: Go to forums, groups or sites where people are interested in the same subject your site is about. See what kind of tools and/or services they could use. People in these sites often have some very good ideas, but lack support and funding to make them a reality. Make the tool or service yourself or have someone else make it for you.
You can also make a keyword report and see what the searchers in your market are looking for. Make sure it is a keyword report that is detailed enough to find what tools and service people are looking for.

Name: Automated Link building
Short description: Use a program to build links.
Direct and targeted traffic: Low to high
Value for search engines: Short terms
Time requirement: Short
Other: Very risky
How to do it: Find a trusted provider of automated link building. Make sure that they know what they are doing. Hope for the best, but fear to get banned by the search engines (They are out to get you).

Name: Donations & Charity
Short description: Give donations and do better in business.
Direct and targeted traffic: Low for most industries.
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: Sleep better at night.
How to do it: Contact charity organizations, open source technology groups and education organisations, etc. Ask for a link to your site against a donation. Try to find sites where you will find your potential costumers and look for a high page ranking and trusted sites.

Name: Press Releases
Short description: Make a good press release and get mentioned and quoted in many articles.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High if it gets picked up by the media.
Time requirement: Low
Other: There is an additional cost to having the press release distributed well.
How to do it: Make a press release, have it distributed. If you make an exact copy of the press release on your site, you might get a penalty for duplicating content. Try to have a look at these press releases sites first: www.prleap.com , www.prweb.com, www.free-press-release.com, www.press-world.com/add, www.pressbox.co.uk, www.e-xl.com

Name: Natural Link building
Short description: Make your site extraordinary good and let people do the link building for you.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low to high
Other: Other link building techniques demand less skill.
How to do it: Build the best site in your industry, specialising in a specific subject, make special automated tools etc. Remember that you probably have to use some link building to get noticed by the people that you hope will link to your site to begin with.

Name: Get inbound links from your outbound links.
Short description: Get links from the sites you are already linking to.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: Improves your online network while building links.
How to do it: Go through your site and find the sites you are already linking to. Contact them and ask if they also want to link to your site. If the answer is “no”, you can consider changing the links to another similar source that accepts linking to you.

Name: Business contact.
Short description: Get links from your business network.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: Use it as an excuse to contact your old business network that you have been out of contact with for some time.
How to do it: Have the people that work in your company contact their business network and ask if they could link to your site or if you could link to each other. Your suppliers can sell more if you sell more and you might send more costumers along the supply chain. Remember that people like to help; it is a part of being in a business network.

Name: Translation
Short description: Translate your site to another language.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: Opens a new market. Get a web site in another language for a fraction of the cost involved to develop your web site in the original language.
How to do it: Translate your site to another language that some of your costumers are using or a language that your potential costumers are using. If you are in a highly competitive area, the links that you build in the new language can give you the competitive advantage. We recommend that you start building links in another language when it starts getting very difficult to get links in your ordinal language. If your website isn’t in English you find it much easier to get links to an English version.

Name: Open Source helping
Short description: Help Open Source projects and receives links and positive branding
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low to high
Other: Try to conduct yourself in a proper manner. Some Open Source projects are anti commercial.
How to do it: Find an Open Source project that is relevant for your business and research what you can do to help. Some Open Source webpages offer a link for some work; others have a tradition to credit you for the work. Maybe some of your employees are already working for an Open Source project and can get you a link. Try to offer a day off to acknowledge the work the person has put into the project.

Name: Bribing webmasters
Short description: Find webmasters that are more hungry than idealistic
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Medium
Other: Make sure that your brand can stand an exposure of your techniques.
How to do it: Find a webmaster at a university or other places, which will put a link to your site if they get a pizza delivery.

Name: Distribute valuable resources.
Short description: Make resources where you insert your link and distribute it to other websites.
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Depends on the time it takes to make the resources that all website in your industry have to have in their website
Other: The more tasteful you can insert your link in the resource, the easier it will be to get it distributed.
How to do it: Find a valuable resource that other websites must have. It can be a tool, software, document or multimedia.
Find a copyright that fit your strategy here.
Start sharing your resources. Some examples of ways to share are: Contact webmasters direct or indirect, release it on p2p networks, offer it to other sellers or sell it yourself on e-bay with reseller rights, advertise it in relevant forums or blogs, if your resources is a software, then you can add it to software directories. Make a strategy that fits your resource.

Name: Write a link technique for this post
Short description: Describe a worthy link building method here, you will be listed and given full credit
Direct and targeted traffic: High
Value for search engines: High
Time requirement: Low
Other: You are also able to get a blog post in this blog if you can write a to the point, high quality post about internet marketing.
How to do it: Use the typography of this post, describe a worthy link building method in the comments and I will move it up in the post and credit you for it.

I realize I am not a link building expert, but as all webmasters I need to keep up-to-date with link-building. I use this list to get inspired when I am out of link building ideas and when I find new link building methods I list them here.

I plan to update this list of link building methods as I find other methods worth mentioning.

Do you have any good or bad experience with some of these or other link building methods?