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.
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.
Part five part of this six part blog series on SEO explains how you can build up the number of links pointing to your site.
This is a common problem businesses have – how can you increase the number of links pointing to your site. We’ve already established that link farms and reciprocal linking is a big no no. So what other options do you have available?
Here are a list of link building ideas:
Blogging: Good quality blog posts help to build links, as other bloggers may link to them. You can also register your blog with RSS feed directories and submit each blog post to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc)
Social Media: Social media is becoming more prevalent in marketing than ever. It’s not clear yet exactly how much weigh the search engines will place on the links resulting from sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn etc, but it’s still a very worthwhile area to invest some time in. There are many more benefits to social media than just link building
Press Releases: Creating optimised press releases and submitting them to online newswires are an excellent way of generating a high volume of good quality links
Article Marketing: Creating well written and well optimised articles and submitting them to sites like eZine and GoArticle will help generate not only good quality links, but click throughs from reputable sources
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):
Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.
Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.
So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.
Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.
In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO). Building the number of high quality inbound links is something that all small businessess should be doing as it has a huge impact on the ranking of your web pages in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
The reason why links are so important, is because it helps to build up the ‘trust’ value of your website. In order to be ranked high, the search engines need to have trust in your site. Many factors affect this trust issue, such as domain age, site size, freshness of content, but most of all it is the number of good quality links pointing to it. Each of these links are like a vote – a vote from one website saying that they trust and value your site enough to mention it on their site.
So how can you increase the number of inbound links? Well like most things, there are many ways – here are a few summarised within three areas:
Link baiting: Generating such great content, that people can’t help but link to it
PR: Creating press releases that link to your site
Manual Link Building: Finding sites that are relevant to yours where you can submit your link to – such as directories, community organisations, as well as bloggers and industry sites.
Yahoo LinkDomain Search
To find out more about generating some links to your site, view the video below. This will show you a way in which you can not only generate some links to your site, but also keep an eye on what your competitors are doing using the Yahoo LinkDomain search query. It is also a good way of keeping track of who is linking to your small business website.
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If you want to know more about link building strategies, or about other ways in which you can increase your online presence, please get in touch with us at SMEketing. Call us, email us or complete our Contact Us form!
Part five part of this six part blog series on SEO explains how you can build up the number of links pointing to your site.
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of 
