The link-building process is one of the pillars of SEO. It helps increase your site’s public awareness while also helping you attain higher search engine rankings. The number of inbound links to your site is a measure of its popularity. Each backlink is a vote for your site. All votes count, but search engines do not view them in the same way. Focus your efforts on links that will bring in the most value to your site.
The most effective way to build great links is to build great content. Creating open source software, a free service, a browser plug-in, interesting content, a web comic, or any other value-add feature will work.
Internal link-building activities include the creation of link bait. There are many types of link bait. In this chapter, we will explore how to create a sample website widget, which is one type of link bait. You can also use the social bookmarking paradigm to your advantage. Social bookmarks help make it easy for your visitors to remember, bookmark, and share your site’s content. Social bookmarks can help bring huge amounts of inbound traffic to your site.
Using website syndication is the norm for any serious site on the Internet today. Whether you want to use RSS or Atom feeds, syndicate as much of your content as possible. You can use services such as FeedBurner to obtain stats about your feeds.
We will also cover submissions to web directories in this chapter. Not all directories are created equal. We will explore several types of directories and how you can find them. Finding web directories on the Internet is easy with the help of search engines.
To round out the chapter, we will explore ways to increase your web presence by building additional complementary sites to fortify your main site. This includes building your own directory, awards, and product or service review sites.
Link building takes time. You want to make sure your time is not wasted. Before you start your link-building campaign, perform some research to ensure that you invest your time wisely.
Even if you don’t have a site today, you can still help your future business by being a part of various Internet communities. You can start your own blog, contribute articles to authority sites in your niche, and become active in social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn. When the appropriate time comes, expose your new business website across all of these channels that were cultivated over time.
Granted, not everyone has the time to do this. In you fall into this category, you can use the classic networking approach: stay in touch with your contacts. When you are ready, let them know what you are working on and ask them to help promote your new site by adding links on their sites (and therefore, spreading your news to their contacts).
If you are just starting with a new website, assessing your current situation should be fairly straightforward. If your site is not live yet, you may still have some links pointing to it. This may be the case if you bought an expired domain that still has some residual links, or if you have let others know of your site prior to it being officially live.
If you are working with an existing site, it is important to evaluate the current state of your inbound links. Check your web stats logs with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, or any other web tracking software that shows your referrals. Aggregate this information in a list so that you can get a baseline before starting your new link-building campaign (this will enable you to properly measure your campaign results).
You can use a spreadsheet document to record your current state assessment. Figure 12-1 shows a sample you can use in your tracking. The spreadsheet is available for download at http://book.seowarrior.net.
It makes sense to know what link-building strategies your competitors are using. It would be foolish to ignore their linking strategies. As link building takes time, missing out on specific link-building strategies could be costly.
When looking for competitors, you should start with local ones, as that information may be easier to find. Look at your local business listings as well as the Yellow Pages, specific niche directories, and similar resources. Pick up your local newspapers and see whether you can find some competitors.
Get a good sample of old and new businesses and research their inbound links. Go after sites that link to your competitors. Don’t stop at emulation. See whether you can do better than what they have done. Just because your competitors are ranking high in a particular niche does not mean they have done their due diligence. They may just be playing the field by themselves.
Explore different ways to get better inbound links. You can do this in many ways. At a basic level, assess the inbound links your competition uses. Try to figure out their relative worth. Find out how many pages are linking to the page containing the inbound competitor link. Look at the overall site popularity, age, inbound links, estimated traffic, and so forth. Find sites that are better, and get your inbound links placed on those sites. You can also combine multiple competitors’ strategies into your own hybrid strategy. In other words, use an aggregate of methodologies found on several high-ranking sites.
After examining your competition and analyzing your current state, you are ready to formulate some link-building goals. Shoot for the stars, but be realistic. Optimize your time by going after links that will provide most of the benefits. Go after reputable, authoritative, and noncompeting sites that are related to your site.
Nothing is better than natural link acquisition. This occurs when people who are genuinely interested in your site link to it. Information travels fast on the Internet. As long as your site is of great quality, you will reach a tipping point where it will no longer be necessary to invest much effort in link building. This is something any site owner should desire: having a site that is so infectious that it becomes the buzz.
Although you can certainly let things develop naturally, you can speed things up by placing your links across different sites on the Internet. You need to ensure that your link-building campaigns are targeting many different sites to make your inbound links look more natural. Pursuing only one type of site, such as blogs, directories, or forums, would not be overly effective. Spice it up!
All links carry some value. Some links are worth more than others. How do you tell what the backlink from a particular site is worth? You can use a number of factors when determining potential inbound link quality. High-quality inbound links originate from topically similar pages. The best inbound links appear on pages that rank well for your targeted keywords. High-quality links also appear on pages with few or no ads or other links.
There are countless opportunities for link building. Everything starts on your site. Your site should make it easy and intuitive for anyone wanting to link to it. To increase your chances of people linking to your site, you need to provide something of value.
The following subsections talk about the rudimentary elements that all sites need to consider.
Take out the guesswork for your web visitors by providing the HTML code fragment(s) for people to link to your site. Create “Link to Us” and “Tell a Friend” links. Most CMS software includes prebuilt forms for handling these simple concepts.
Running your own newsletter provides several benefits. First, you get to remind your existing visitors of your new offerings, whether it is content, products, or services. Plus, the recipients of your newsletter are likely to forward it to people they know if they find your newsletter interesting.
Many sites offer free and members-only content. This model offers several benefits. If your free content is already great, many of your visitors will also be interested in your members-only content. The idea is that the content that is provided to members only is of even greater quality than the public content. Many sites charge for members-only content. Providing registered services helps you build up the email lists that you can use in your marketing campaigns. Be sure to provide members with opt-in and opt-out options if you’re using this channel and strategy.
The terms link bait and link baiting describe the concept of creating interesting content with the intent of creating maximum Internet buzz to get as many people to link to your site as possible. Link bait exists in many forms. Having great content is your most basic link-baiting technique. You can also think of link bait as content “hooks.” Table 12-1 shows some of the most common content hooks.
Type | Description |
News | Providing timely news information on any topic can be the main catalyst for retaining and gaining visitor traffic |
Information | You can provide information in many different formats, including whitepapers, case studies, research, and various statistics |
Gifts, contests, awards, sales, discounts | Enticing people with gifts, contests, awards, sales, and discounts are traditional ways to attract attention |
Humor, controversy | You can promote your site by using jokes, funny pictures (videos or sounds), and even controversial information |
Software and widgets | Providing free software and widgets is another way to promote your online assets |
Games | Online games and multiplayer games can be addicting and can bring visitors back to your site time and again |
All forms of link bait have one thing in common: they promote your name, site, and brand. Great link bait fosters accelerated link building and site recognition. When done right, link bait can become extremely viral.
Website widgets are simple, self-contained, value-added units of functionality. They are typically confined to small blocks of screen real estate on one or all the pages of your site. Any information that you can package in a way that provides unique value to other sites can be made into a widget.
You can see many examples of website widgets at http://www.widgetbox.com/, http://springwidgets.com/, and http://glittertools.com/. Figure 12-2 shows an example widget that you can place on your website to see the latest article headlines from Digg.com.
Everything starts with an idea. Creating custom widgets can be as simple or as complex as required. You can create some website widgets by simply creating custom HTML pages. Others you can create by utilizing Atom/RSS feeds, Java applets, and Flash. In this section, we will create a sample HTML-based widget to illustrate the concepts of link baiting and website widgets.
Let’s suppose you own a site that sells many different brands of alarm clocks. To promote your site, you want to create your own link bait. Specifically, you want to create a simple digital alarm clock widget (called Wake Up Service) that any site can link to or use. When the widget is used on other sites, you specify the condition that your link must be present to use the widget.
On your site, you also want to ensure that your link bait is highly visible (typically placed at a strategic location for easy recognition). Figure 12-3 shows an example web page layout. You can decide to use a pop-up window widget or one that renders in the same browser window.
Figure 12-4 shows our Wake Up Service widget as rendered in a web browser. You can find the HTML code at http://scripts.seowarrior.net/quickpanel/wakeup.html. For more of my widget examples, please visit http://scripts.seowarrior.net/quickpanel/.
You can proliferate your widgets in many ways. You can do it from your site, you can use a third-party site, or you can employ both methods. Make it easy for your visitors by offering simple cut-and-paste HTML code such as the following:
<a href="http://scripts.seowarrior.net/quickpanel/wakeup.html" target="_new">Wake Up Service</a>
This sample code shows the link to our Wake Up Service widget, which will open in a new window. For website widgets such as the one we created in this example, you could also write a small article that will be syndicated along with all of your other articles. People subscribing to your feeds will be able to read about it and propagate the information if they find it interesting.
Let’s examine how to use a third-party tool when promoting your widgets. If you’re using Widgetbox.com, the process is straightforward. You open an account, import your widget in an appropriate format, submit your widget for approval, and after a day or so your widget becomes public in the Widgetbox.com library. To view usage (installation) stats, come back a few days later. You have the option of hosting all of your widget-related files on your site. A paid account removes widget ads and allows you to create widgets for many of the popular social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and Hulu. You can also promote your widgets just like you promote your site, using many of the same techniques we discuss in this chapter.
Figure 12-5 shows the basic model of a typical social bookmarking site.
Social bookmarking is the concept of adding (typically) article and media bookmarks across various social bookmarking sites. It is a way to store and access bookmarks from anywhere. Everyone benefits in this model. Publishers get a wider audience and web users enjoy fresh, popular content.
Many websites utilize social bookmarking feeds as their additional content. To use social bookmarks, web users need to register with a social bookmarking provider. After users register with a particular provider, they are typically offered the option to install the provider’s web browser toolbar. This makes it easier to add bookmarks.
Users surf the Internet while storing and tagging their bookmarks. Provider sites aggregate this social data while showing the most popular links (article leads) on their front page portal. In addition to running portals, social bookmarking sites also provide APIs, tools, and an infinite number of feed types to satisfy any appetite. Millions of other sites leverage these tools when republishing the same content.
The apparent advantage of social bookmarking systems over search engine technology is in the fact that all data is organized by human beings. Social bookmarks employ the concept of collaborative (social) tagging as well as a democratic voting mechanism. Each participant of a social bookmarking system typically tags each bookmark with her custom keywords while also giving her vote to the bookmark. Social bookmarking platforms tabulate these votes when showing the most popular bookmarks.
In terms of SEO, your goal is to utilize social bookmarking to make it easy for everyone to promote your website content. Many social bookmarking providers are available. Some of the popular ones include:
Also note that search engines crawl and index pages showing bookmarked content. This includes social bookmarking portals in addition to thousands of sites using customized feeds from these social bookmarking providers. Your links have the potential to be republished on thousands of websites.
Each provider will be a bit different when it comes to integrating social bookmarks on your site. But the idea is basically the same. You show an icon next to your content that will allow your visitors to add your link to their preferred social bookmarking site. The most popular links earn the most visibility and value. The following fragment shows example code required to show social bookmarking icons for Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit:
<!--Digg.com --> <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> digg_url = 'http://www.YourCoolDomain.com/YourCoolPageLink'; </script> <!--StumbleUpon.com--> <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit? url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Farticle.php %26title%3DThe%2BArticle%2BTitle"> <img border=0 src="http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/120x20_su_gray.gif" alt=""></a> <!--ReddIt.com--> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/buttonlite.js?i=2"> </script>
Many icon variations are available for you to use. The sample code renders the three icons in a web browser, as shown in Figure 12-6.
Each social bookmarking platform will have its own interface to track your URLs. For example, if you wanted to track your bookmarked URL on Delicious.com, you could use its URL tracking service at http://delicious.com/url/. Figure 12-7 illustrates how to do this. Simply enter your URL in the provided form, submit the form, and observe the results.
The resulting screen (as shown in Figure 12-7) contains four main parts. The header part shows the bookmark count. Moving down the screen you can see details about each bookmark (as saved by each user). At the bottom of the screen, you can also subscribe to this URL’s RSS feed. Finally, at the right side of the screen you can see the associated bookmark tags sorted in order of popularity.
Some sites go to extremes. How many of us have seen sites appending too many social bookmarking icons to every single piece of their content on every page, as shown in Figure 12-8? There is no need for this clutter.
There is an elegant solution to this problem. You can use a single icon with the ability to post to any social bookmarking site you want. This is what the ShareThis and AddThis services do.
Both of these providers use website-neutral code. You can add their code to any web page on any site. Here is the code fragment required to create the two icons:
<!-- ShareThis Button BEGIN --> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js# publisher=5c02a2bf-4c91-4215-805b-5155b4c52056&type=website"> </script> <!-- ShareThis Button END --> <!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --> <a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250" onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')" onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()"> <img src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif" width="125" height="16" alt="Bookmark and Share" style="border:0"/></a> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js?pub=xa- 4a256e6f0aeb1299"></script> <!-- AddThis Button END -->
Figure 12-9 shows how these two icons work. Initially, each provider shows only a single icon. When you click on or hover your mouse cursor over the icons, they expand to show you more options. These options include most of the other popular social bookmarking icons. In addition, both providers let you email the current link to your colleagues and friends. The ShareThis icon also allows you to send AIM and SMS messages.
In most cases, you may want to stick to the most popular social bookmarking platforms such as Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Showing only these three pertinent icons can do the trick for all of your social bookmarking needs.
Website syndication is the de facto standard for content publication. Content publishers publish content in various formats. Syndicated content provides a medium to reach a greater subscriber audience. Subscribers use tools such as Atom and RSS feed readers to stay abreast of newly published content. When users subscribe to your feeds, you have a unique opportunity to keep them interested in your site.
Content syndication provides other benefits as well. You can think of your website feeds as your own broadcast Internet stations. Many sites will republish your content in some fashion. Often, you will want to allow others to publish article leads or teasers. Those who want to read the entire article can visit your site. When they come to your site, they will also see other elements of your site that will hopefully produce additional clicks.
Two of the most popular syndications types are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom. The initial goals of the Atom format were to improve on RSS ambiguities in terms of content payload. For example, in RSS feeds you can use plain text or HTML (with no explicit standard to indicate the content format within the feed file). Although RSS feeds are still popular, Atom is gaining traction, as propelled by industry giants Google and Microsoft.
Web users employ a variety of feed readers to read your syndicated content. With the explosion of social media sites, feed readers are now equipped to propagate syndicated content further. Figure 12-10 shows the Google Reader interface. The interface contains many sharing options that all help to propagate interesting articles.
Google Reader also provides the option to share any of the articles you have chosen to share on your website or blog. Simply choose the “Add a clip” option after clicking on the “Shared items” link on the left side of the page. For example, here is the HTML fragment that I can use to share the articles of my choice on any website:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher-en.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/ 08812256800216401263/state/com.google/broadcast?n=5& callback=GRC_p(%7Bc%3A%22green%22%2Ct%3A%22John%5C's%20shared%20items %22%2Cs%3A%22false%22%2Cb%3A%22false%22%7D)%3Bnew%20GRC"> </script>
Figure 12-11 shows how this might look when included on a web page.
This should speak volumes about the importance of utilizing website syndication. Sites can disseminate content in many ways, including via social media sites (either natively or via custom add-on options).
You can think of FeedBurner as a transparent tracking and management tool for your website feeds. What Google Analytics can do for your web page stats, FeedBurner can do for your website feeds. Figure 12-12 shows Feed Subscribers, one of the most important FeedBurner metrics.
Figure 12-12 shows two colored lines. The green line (the thicker of the two) represents user subscriptions over time, and the blue line illustrates the number of people who have either viewed or clicked on a particular item within your feed. These are not the only metrics FeedBurner provides.
The FeedBurner service provides many features. These include services to analyze, optimize, publicize, monetize, and troubleshoot your feeds. Figure 12-13 shows the tabbed options for these features.
In the Analyze section, you can view your subscriber base in more detail, including seeing specific clicks, a geographical map overlay, and so forth. You also have the option to export the subscriber data as an Excel or CSV file. Here is how an exported file might look:
Date Subscribers Reach Item Views Item Clickthroughs Hits 05-30-2009 100 35 88 10 113 05-31-2009 98 32 90 14 268 06-01-2009 97 42 90 13 272 06-02-2009 94 21 78 10 161 06-03-2009 98 42 60 11 263 06-04-2009 92 70 80 10 261 06-05-2009 112 20 55 10 157 06-06-2009 130 80 150 12 358 06-07-2009 147 99 163 14 457 06-08-2009 222 140 320 12 358
In the Optimize section, you can utilize the SmartCast, SmartFeed, and FeedFlare options. The SmartCast option allows you to create a richer, more detailed listing in the iTunes Podcast Directory and in sites using Yahoo! Media RSS. The SmartCast feature allows podcast service providers to optimize their feeds for the iTunes platform. You can specify your podcast category, subcategory, image location, subtitle, summary, search keywords (for Yahoo! MRSS), and author email address. You can also mark your content as explicit in addition to adding a specific copyright message. The SmartFeed feature is disabled by default. Once enabled, it makes your feed compatible with any feed reader. This feature should be enabled for maximum feed propagation. The FeedFlare feature allows you to spice up your feed with popular social networking features. To quote FeedBurner:
Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.
In the Publicize section, you can use several services:
Headline Animator, to display rotating headlines
BuzzBoost, to republish your feed as HTML
Email Subscriptions, to send email updates
PingShot, to provide notification on new posts
FeedCount, to show your feed circulation
Chicklet Chooser, to generate HTML fragments for popular news aggregators
Awareness API, to build applications that can display, analyze, and promote your feed’s traffic data outside of FeedBurner
Creative Commons, to attach the appropriate Creative Commons license in your feed’s XML
Password Protector, to implement Basic HTTP authentication for your feed
NoIndex, to tell search engines not to index your feed
You use the Monetize section of FeedBurner when you want to integrate Google AdSense for your feeds. To implement AdSense for feeds, you must sign in to Google AdSense and click on the “AdSense for feeds” link.
As its name implies, you use the Troubleshootize section to troubleshoot feed problems. FeedBurner calls this service FeedMedic. FeedMedic reports any problems FeedBurner finds with your feeds.
Integrating FeedBurner with your site is relatively simple. You can think of FeedBurner as your website’s feed wrapper service to make your feed more compatible, more visible, and more easily tracked. Figure 12-14 illustrates how FeedBurner works.
To redirect your existing feed(s), you can use the .htaccess redirect mechanism. The following fragment shows an example of a permanent redirect and a temporary redirect:
RewriteEngine On Redirect 301 /news.rss http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NewsFeed Redirect 302 /news2.rss http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NewsFeedTemp
In addition to FeedBurner, other companies provide website tracking and management services, including PostRank, FeedBlitz, Feedity, and RapidFeeds.
FeedBurner is still one of the most popular services for content publishers who want to measure their content syndication subscriber base. After Google acquired FeedBurner, many publishers reported bugs, including a significant drop in their subscribed user base. Google claims to have fixed these bugs in addition to providing more accurate reporting analytics. FeedBurner continues to be a tool of choice for many content publishers. If you wish to use FeedBurner for statistical or marketing purposes, you can redirect your existing feeds to FeedBurner.
As you already saw, FeedBurner is starting to look like the Google Analytics platform. This should only help make FeedBurner easier to use and in line with all of Google’s offerings.
Before you start submitting your sites to directories, you need to ensure that the site titles and descriptions you plan to submit are highly optimized. You should have several variations of these ready before you submit.
Also ensure that your targeted directories will pass link juice.
You can double-check by examining several directory listings and
searching for the nofollow
link
attribute. If a directory is using nofollow
, your efforts will be wasted. Only
use directories that pass link juice.
Another thing to consider is the directory category. Do you really want to submit your site link to a category page with hundreds or even thousands of links? Look for less crowded categories for optimal link juice transfer. Before you choose your target directories, see what their PageRanks are for their home pages. List your directories in the order of their PageRank values. Ensure that each directory you are planning passes link juice.
Spend your time first on directories with the highest PageRank. Also observe the PageRank value of your targeted category page. You don’t want to get a link that is 10 levels deep. Figure 12-15 illustrates how you may want to track this data in an Excel spreadsheet. This is another tab of the same spreadsheet file we discussed earlier.
The spreadsheet contains several columns, namely “Directory” (the URL address), “Type” (free or paid), “Category” (the name of the category you want to target), “PR” (the Google PageRank value), “Page” (the URL of the page you submitted), “Title” (the title description submitted), “Description” (the description submitted), “Submission” (the date of submission to a particular directory), and “Inclusion” (the date your link was included in the directory).
The Web contains many general directories. Search engines like directories that are not automated (i.e., ones that use human reviewers before sites are included in their listings). Google runs its own directory at http://directory.google.com/, which is a copy of Dmoz.org. To get to Google’s directory, you have to go through the Dmoz.org submission process. For starters, submit your site to all of the first-tier directories, including Dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, and YellowPages.com.
Move on to the second-tier directories. They also come in free and paid flavors. Hundreds of second-tier directories charge fees ranging from a few bucks to several hundred dollars. Fees can be one-time or yearly. Some directories let you add your links in exchange for your reciprocal link. Be careful about reciprocal linking.
There are no hard rules as far as how many directories you should submit your site to. You can find general directories in many ways. For instance, you can perform a search query, as shown in the following fragment:
directory "submit a link" general directories directory of directories "general directory" site:dmoz.org inurl:directories small business "add url"|"add link" +general +directory add url|link free|paid
Go after specific vertical (topic-centric) directories. Finding niche directories is easy. You just need to tweak your search queries. Here are some examples for various niche markets:
travel site:dmoz.org inurl:directories "insurance broker directory" wine producers directory electronics manufacturer directory jewelry stores directory
If you are struggling to find directories in your niche, simply use the ones you already have and try doing the following:
related:www.travel-directory.org
Google’s related:
command
lets you find similar sites to the one you supply in
the command’s argument. In our example, we are looking for related
travel directories. You can also use the online service found at
http://www.similicio.us/. Simply enter your
desired URL to get a listing of similar sites.
If your target audience is in a specific geographic area, you should go after regional (local) directories. The rules for finding regional directories are similar, except that this time your search query is expanded to your target areas. Here are a few examples:
toronto "travel agencies" +directory ontario "travel agencies" directory canada "travel agencies" directory boston "pizza restaurants" directory new york "shoe stores" directory los angeles inurl:directory
You can visit http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/ to find more regional directory listings. You can find another directory repository at http://www.web-directories.ws/Regional/.
You should consider submitting your site to Google’s Local Business Center, Microsoft’s Local Listing Center, and Yahoo!’s Local Listing.
You can do many things outside your site to foster healthy link building. You can write articles, submit blog comments, and post to newsgroup and forum messages. What you want to do is leave your URL within any content you create.
Many sites let you submit your articles, including ArticlesBase, EzineArticles, ArticleGeek, and many others. When you choose your article submission vendor, ensure that your articles are always properly credited.
When your articles are (re)published, you want to make sure they contain appropriate attribution by containing one or all of the following: your name, a link to your biography page, and a URL of your choice. To find more article submission services, simply search for article submission service. You may also want to find article submission services for your niche. Simply add your pertinent keywords to the same query to find relevant providers.
The idea is much the same when posting comments to blogs,
newsgroups, and forums as it is when submitting articles. Simply
include your signature with your URL every time you post. Note that
some sites do not allow URLs. Others employ the nofollow
attribute to discourage you from placing links in your
posts.
The basic rule of thumb is to be relevant to the topic you are posting about. Try to include keywords relevant to your site. Otherwise, your post could look like spam and you might get banned. Here are some search command tips you can use to find relevant discussion sites:
"video games" forum wine producers inurl:forum "sports apparel" inurl:forum "fishing gear" forum
This is not a call to create duplicated content. You want to create a complementary content-rich site that targets many other keywords not specifically targeted on your main site. You can utilize a free host or an inexpensive shared host when using this technique. Go easy with cross-linking. Too much or too little is not good. Use a more balanced, natural approach. Host these sites on different IPs as well as different IP range blocks if you can.
You can build your own directories with links to your main site. These directories should be in your niche, and you can list your partner sites, useful tools, and resources. Allow others to submit their links as well. In a sense, you will be creating your own website links hub in addition to your primary (authoritative) site.
Another idea for a complementary site is an awards site. This gives you the opportunity to attract others to link to your site while being able to (shamelessly) promote your own sites of interest.
Thousands of site review websites are on the Web. The number of those that are truly unbiased is, at best, questionable. If others have done this, though, so can you.
Many scripts are available for you to use to build your directories, awards websites, or site review websites. These scripts are available from HotScripts.com, Tucows.com, ScriptSearch.com, Scripts.com, and Fatscripts.com. You can also use one of the many popular CMS packages that are available. Most CMSs provide modules or add-ons to implement just about any kind of site.
In this chapter, you learned how to make your site intuitive enough for anyone to link to it. We discussed how to use link bait, social bookmarks, and content syndication, as well as submitting your site to appropriate web directories. We covered the reason you should add a signature to any content you produce outside your site, and we finished the chapter with tips on how to create sites that are complementary to your primary site, and the benefits that social media websites can offer.
It is important to reiterate that the best way to bring in desired links is to create something outstanding. Unique, compelling content is the best way to achieve your link-building strategy. Be creative as you produce content for your target demographic. Be different.
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