Help Me! I Need 700 New Links ASAP!

July 15, 2010

We recently had a comment via our SMEketing Marketing YouTube channel from a marketer in need of some link building advice:

Hi!

Fantastic video, sooooo helpful!!!

It would be fantastic to see a video on how to create inbound links…..

I went to university in Southampton, and now I am within my first year of a new job and been asked to build 700 links in the next MONTH which is impossible and I dont want to? get my company blacklisted from google how can I do this?

Can you help me with creating quick inbound links to my website?

Thanks

This was our response:

Glad you found the video helpful.

So link building… being asked to produce so many new links in such a short time is not only a bit unrealistic, but it’s not really a good idea. If your site goes from having about 100 links to about 800 in the space of a month, that’s going to look a bit dodgy/spammy to Google.

Link building is all about building up quality links of a sustained period of time. Google wants to see a site that is growing in size and popularity – and getting a steady stream of good quality links is an indicator of a good quality site.

Link building is both about quality and quantity – it’s not an even/or thing (although if you had to pick, going for quality over quantity would be the way to go). You want to have a lot of good quality links.

There are loads of factors that make up a good or bad link. In a nutshell, a good quality link is one that comes from a reputable website, has good anchor text (the blue bit you click on), is on a good quality relevant page (i.e. relevant to your industry) and does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute (which a lot of social media channels/blogs/forums have – basically the ‘nofollow’ attribute stops the linking site from passing any link juice to you through the link).

So the best way to build links is to create really good content that people want to link to. There’s a thing called ‘link bait’ which is basically defined as any kind of content that people want to link to. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

So you can create content such as:

- Free Tools
- Web 2.0 Applications
- Top 10 Lists
- Industry-Related Humor
- Reviews of Events
- Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
- Surveys or Collections of Data
- Film or Animation
- Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets
- Contests, Giveaways and Competitions
- Trend-Spotting
- Advice from Multiple Experts

Also things like press releases that you can upload to free newswires and articles that you can upload to sites like Ezine are a great way of generating links.

So I hope this helps! If you need any additional marketing assistance, let me know. We offer a range of outsourced marketing services at SMEketing and can do as little as an hours work, right up to a certain amount of days a month. You can email us at info@SMEketing.com.

Also follow us on Twitter – http://twitter.com/SMEketing and follow our blog – we normally blog a lot about SEO – http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/

Link building is something that should be taken on as part of an on-going marketing strategy; it’s not something that should be done in short, sharp bursts. Think about what content your prospects and customer want to use and read. High quality content will always create high quality links – it just takes time and effort.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Tags: (SEO), link bait, link building, search engine optimisation