A Successful Link Campaign Begins with Content
By: Marcia Yudkin marcia@yudkin.com
These days, one of the best routes to traffic from search engines is posting substantive content that has value for a particular audience. Then you want to get that content linked like heck. Inbound links increase your chances of rising in the search engine ranks. When you've chosen an appealing topic, filled your piece with meaty content and kept self-promotion to no more than 10 percent of the file, you should be able to arrange free links with a lot of effort and no monetary outlay. Here's how I've done it.
The obvious, head-on type of link campaign would involve visiting a search engine, plunking in the keywords that would index your bait piece and screening the sites that turn up, selecting those likely to be receptive to a link request. Best bets: non-commercial information sites trying to offer comprehensive links to quality resources in your topic area. For linking to your bait piece, forget brochure sites of companies and professional firms unless they include a sizable link directory.
Because this method forces you to screen out so many poor candidates for links, I use a more backhanded technique. First I identify a well-established site or page containing substantive bait that targets the very audience I would like to reach. By "well-established," I mean something from a respected source that has been on the Web for at least a year -- the longer the better. Then I perform a link search to hone in on sites that have linked to the well-established site's bait.
For instance, when looking for sites to link to my resources for freelance writers, I sifted through sites linking to the late lamented Inkspot, which predated me on the Web by a couple of years. When looking for link candidates in the solo-professional category for my marketing and publicity resources, I performed a link search on predecessor Working Solo.
Several of the major search engines make a link search easy to do. For example, at altavista.com, if I wanted to find which sites had linked to the ClickZ Network, I would type "+link:clickz.com -site:clickz.com" (without the quotation marks) into the search box. This asks go.com to find all pages linking to clickz.com except pages within the ClickZ domain itself.
You can also use free-standing services set up for precisely this kind of search, such as linkpopularity.com, which provides easy access to the links turned up by Altavista, Hotbot and Google.
Now once you've identified sites you consider likely to add a link to yours, how should you approach them? I'm not a big fan of a "you link me, I'll link you..." overture. To me that implies that your site lacks intrinsic value and that you have to add an incentive to become worthy of the link. Also, you'll often find sites you don't want to link to (because they're amateur-looking or contain nothing distinctive, for instance) but still want links from. Instead, I tell the Webmaster or site owner that I'm writing to tell them about a new resource on ___ that would make their list of links even more valuable, or more comprehensive.
If you are creating a master list of topical links for your own site, it works well to say that you've linked to them and would they consider a link in return? This makes most people curious enough to check your site and reciprocate where appropriate.
Make sure your link request is patently personal, a genuine one-to-one message. And instead of merely providing a URL that you invite them to check out, provide the title of your bait piece and say something about its value to their site visitors. Something in the format of a press release, or any kind of carbon-copy message, will definitely not yield the results you want.
I have to admit that even with the strategy outlined above, the quest for links is tedious and slow. Don't even get started with it unless you feel relaxed, with a long evening ahead of you. You'll encounter frequent frustration when you find a perfect link candidate and comb the site in vain for the Webmaster or site owner's e-mail address -- indeed, any contact information at all.
Above all, remember that links to your bait piece are not the end in themselves. You've installed your bait within your site, so that any inbound link to your information piece stimulates readers who find it valuable to explore the rest of your site and buy your products or sign on as clients. That's the real goal of all this work!
Copyright 2001 Marcia Yudkin. All rights reserved.
Marcia Yudkin is the author of Poor Richard’s Web Site Marketing Makeover, Internet Marketing for Less than $500/Year and nine other books. Based in Boston, she performs marketing makeovers of Web sites and print materials and runs a training program certifying Web Site Marketing Makeover Consultants. Find out more at http://www.yudkin.com/mmakeover.htm
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
More Website Content Articles
More By Developer Shed
 developerWorks - FREE Tools!
|
This demonstration gives you an overview of IBM® Rational® Build Forge Express Edition, a global offering that provides a framework to automate and execute software processes. Rational Build Forge provides a software assembly line that can support all of your tools, technologies, and platforms so you can achieve a repeatable, reliable, and traceable build and release process.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Learn to enable users to both rate existing animations and to combine existing animations into new snippets. This is the third in a series of three tutorials that chronicle the building of a site that enables collaborative discussion and animation building using Domino and OpenLaszlo.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
CakePHP is a stable production-ready, rapid-development aid for building Web sites in PHP. This "Cook up Web sites fast with CakePHP" series shows you how to build an online product catalog using CakePHP.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Download the Rational Application Developer (RAD) v7.5 open beta code and start developing applications for the JEE5 standard which features EJB3.0, JPA, JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5 standards. When you use this beta you will see how you can increase developer productivity for already existing applications with improved support for refactoring, as well as adding new features to existing applications. In addition, the beta provides tooling for JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft to improve the developer productivity with these enterprise systems.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
As systems increase in complexity, communication between systems and software teams becomes more and more difficult. Now, there’s a way to improve product quality and communication.<br />Read the “Model Driven Systems Development” white paper to see how. Also included in this kit are more educational white papers, customer examples, tutorials, informative Webcasts, and best practices for designing, building and managing systems.<br />
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Portfolio Management is about effectively managing portfolio value by aligning portfolio investments with business goals. This complimentary e-kit provides a collection of materials that can help you understand how IBM Rational enables and automates best practices for improved governance and clear visibility into portfolio and project performance across the entire IT project lifecycle.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Rational Modeling Extension for Microsoft .NET enhances usability for code generation supporting a more intelligent refactoring. The latest enhancements enable organizations with Java and .NET systems and software development maintain architectural integrity across heterogeneous platforms.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Because access to government information continues to be an area of concern for many U.S. citizens with disabilities, the U.S. government enacted Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in 2001 to ensure that government agencies create accessible Web content, enabling all citizens to access the information they need. A fully accessible Web site makes Web content accessible to all individuals, including those with disabilities, who may be accessing Web content via a variety of user agents. Common user agents include standard Web browsers, text-only browsers, assistive devices and mobile devices such as cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs).
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
As organizations have grown increasingly dependent on online software, the risk of malicious attacks has also become far more serious. Fortunately, well-governed organizations can protect their Web applications by injecting vulnerability assessments and ethical hacks into their software development and delivery processes. This paper describes 12 of the most common hacker attacks and provides basic rules that you can follow to help create more hack-resistant Web applications.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
This paper is about the critical role that a discipline called integrated requirements management can play in helping to ensure that your business goals and IT investments are continuously aligned—whether you are sourcing, integrating, building or maintaining software. It also looks at ways that automated IBM Rational® products can work together to help you use requirements in the very best way.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
All FREE IBM® developerWorks Tools!
|
