It all starts with providing great content
All the links in the world won’t help if you create content nobody wants. Sure you may get traffic to your website, but in the end it won’t deliver value to your readers/customers and they will leave your site and search for what they are trying to find elsewhere.
Give them a reason to not only stay on your site but refer you to their friends, family, and colleagues. It is important that you have great content that people want to link to. Be informative, be helpful and be entertaining.
The more people like love the content you provide the more you will get back in terms of links, sales, loyalty and readers.
Here are a couple of posts on understanding the importance of great content: Why content marketing matters and What Roxie Hart can teach you about growing an audience
Guest posting and article writing
These are two very popular methods people use to get recognition, links, authority, and branding.
Having a good guest post and article strategy can significantly boost your traffic.
When writing articles/guest posts write some of your best content and make sure it is written with these four rules in mind:
Be informative:
The reason most of us search the internet is to find the information we are looking for.
Whether it is entertainment, an answer to a problem, or joining a community.
Providing people with the information the are looking for is the first step to building an audience and getting links.
Drive emotion:
If you can make your audience, laugh, cry or become curious you’ve developed an emotional attachment that goes way beyond just looking for information.
They are now emotionally invested and want to learn more from you because they like you and because you have opened them up in ways that dry content never can.
Give the audience what they want:
Remember you are doing this for your audience.
Don’t get side tracked in technical, self-centered or unreadable content that takes a PhD to understand.
Ask them what they are interested in and give it to them.
The more you know about what your audience wants the better you will be at gaining links, loyalty and traffic.
Offer more:
When you are finished with your guest post/article use the about section in a way that shows them you have more great stuff to offer.
Instead of simply putting in basic information in the about section such as your name and website use that space to inform them that you have more information related to your post such as a newsletter, free e-book, or blog post series that will give them more of what they want if they click on your link and direct them to that content they are craving on your site.
Tip: Make sure you read the guest/article posting guidelines before attempting to write a post. It is important that you also give the site owners what they are looking for, and if possible (and allowed to) provide one or two links back to your site in the content but only if it is extremely relevant to your topic and the site owners are ok with it.
Getting referrals
Getting referrals can be a great linking strategy.
When I first started learning about building an online business I would find a site that I really enjoyed learn as much as I could from it and click on links that the site recommended to me.
I can’t vouch for everyone, but in a way I felt a good referral was even better than a guest post in some cases because it came straight from the site owner as a recommendation.
I knew if he/she provided excellent content on the site I loved than whoever they recommend me to is probably just as great.
don’t overlook internal linking
This is a big mistake many beginners make when starting their own site.
Linking to your own content via internal links can not only make your information more relevant to readers by allowing and directing them to continue reading the content they are most interested in, it also allows search engines to crawl your site, index your pages better and categorize your content for the search engines which can result in better ranking for your keywords and possibly give you a higher page rank as well.
Linking highly popular posts to posts that readers weren’t aware of or didn’t originally get much love can increase that posts visibility and allow you to build more links and potential readers, which makes your content look more valuable and authoritative to search engines.
using social media
A good social media strategy can go a long way for increasing your visibility.
Social media sites such as Facebook or twitter allow you to make others aware of your presence in a format they are most familiar with.
It is a great platform because it has such a huge social network designed specifically for communication.
It’s great for sharing content and creating your own social networks.
It helps you keep everyone in the loop with promotions, product offers and new content, and gives you a great basis for finding your audience.
When others post information about you or your site it shows up right on the front on their page, account or Facebook wall and all of their friends can see exactly what they are doing, share it with their friends and so on.
If they are interested in your content it can be a great referral source and with over 600 million active Facebook users viewing each others pages and seeing what their friends are up to and over 200 million twitter accounts you have a large pool of individuals who may be looking for exactly what you are providing.
If done properly a lot of link love can be spread in a very short time allowing you to grow an audience in a much shorter amount of time than you might imagine.
Using social media platforms that aren’t as competitive can also help boost your traffic by allowing you to utilize undervalued social networks to gain a larger market for your content and products
write a lot of great content using long tail key words
The more content you produce the more opportunities you have for ranking well in search engines and being found by those doing the searches. Some of your posts may fare very well in searches while others bomb, so using long tail keywords (keywords that are longer then two words) strategically can help you rank better since these terms are both searched for and optimized for less often.
Being able to target specific long tail keywords in your content can greatly enhance the placement of your content on search engines.
Remember you must write great content that people want to link to and share otherwise your wasting your time building links that nobody cares about.
Read off page optimization for more strategies on building links
This post is part of the seo school and content marketing series.