10 Ways to Improve Your Link Building Efforts
To enhance your current link building strategy, use these 10 tips for choosing partners, optimizing communication, calculating effectiveness, and delivering valuable content.
To enhance your current link building strategy, use these 10 tips for choosing partners, optimizing communication, calculating effectiveness, and delivering valuable content.
Independent of the link building strategy you are working on, there are simple improvements that can make your effort so much more efficient. Here are 10 of them:
Choose link partners or the type of link partners your competitor or international counterpart already has in their link profile. If possible, get links from the same partners.
When you do have the choice, select webmasters that are likely to respond quickly to your requests and don’t require months to place the link. Look for recent posts, updates, and some existing external links on the site.
Who is the person you are contacting? Is it the owner of the website who is able to make split-second decisions, or are company politics involved in getting the link placed? Find online information to personalize your communications. If possible, call directly, as even small talk has the potential to yield discovered common interests.
Don’t communicate as a company, but as a person with opinions, likes, fears, and so on. Though you may represent a company, it’s important to be personable in your communications. Generating a mutual liking of something will make negotiations easier.
Make sure you measure the effectiveness of each individual step in your link building process. Where does the effectiveness lag behind? Can you find the right contact information? Do they seem interested or have any reaction at all? Will they place the link and if so, is the link placed the way you envisioned it? Asking yourself these questions can even help you do more multivariate testing on your approach.
Don’t spend too much effort for one link. Instead, determine how much time and effort a link is worth, and don’t invest any more than that. Spreading a similar effort across multiple potential link partners may make link building more effective, but extending it across various link building strategies and partner types allows you to generate a full, natural link profile.
It happens all too often that your company is mentioned or the desired content is placed, but a link to the site is omitted. Make sure any and all mentions seem incomplete without the link. Do this by including claims that are easily verified with proof on your site, or by addressing many views on the same topic. A specific promotion to attract links should contain a link to the attached terms and conditions.
Don’t be too afraid to address sensitive topics. Though there are some risks to your reputation, you will ultimately attract many more links. Get attention for important subjects by using bold statements. To make more mild statements that still encourage engagement, open by saying things such as, “What if …?”
It is much easier to attract links with information than with products. Products or services can attract links, but they require more effort. People will link to special services, or desired products and discounts for their readers. They will also link when paid to do so.
Relevance to a keyword can be found in many places. Look for the least logical terms, and it will be much easier to get links. In cases where a word has multiple meanings, you can exchange links to help lost visitors. You can also look for complementing services and in any case, limit the conflict of interest when a site has a large overlap in services.