Building Links is Like Shaving: If You Don’t Do It Every Day You Look Like a Bum
This is a guest post by Terry Mickelson founder of Page Views, Inc.
For years, you have probably had a daily routine for shaving. But have you developed a system of building links?
No one pops out of bed each morning and races to the sink to shave. It is a tedious and potentially dangerous daily necessity. But without a daily shave, our appearance begins to get a little shabby. Linking is the same way.
Rare is the webmaster who jumps out of bed, races to his/her computer excited to find inbound links. Yet, no matter how optimized a site is, without inbound links it is never going to be found in the search engine results pages. Even established sites that buy traffic but don’t have something the visitors find worth while to link to are in the same boat.
Chances are good that you are like most people who build a few links here and there, but don't really have an overall link building strategy.
When it comes to shaving you can almost automate the process by using an electric razor. Of course the shave is not as good as using a blade. Building links using an automated system is not as good as getting links manually either. No automated system can generate quality naturally built links that are on topic, vary the text, vary the source of the links or incorporate the dynamic aspects of social media.
There are also dangers involved in both shaving and linking. You would never think about taking an electric razor that’s plugged into an electrical outlet, into the shower. But you may not even know the dangers of linking to bad sites or what can happen when you try building your link base by cutting corners. Links to the wrong sites, using only one technique like reciprocal links, building links too quickly or getting caught buying links – can do damage to your sites reputation with the search engines.
Although there are new technologies like waterproof, electric razors that give a good shave, the best shave still comes from a hot towel and a straight razor in a professional's hand. This is also true about links. There are auto submission sites for articles, mass social book marking tools, link farms and link exchanges. But the best link base a site can have is consistently built one link at a time by people who understand their industry, their business, their customers and make common sense decisions about how and where to get links.
A good link building strategy involves two things. Time and consistency. The more time you consistently put into generating links and cultivating relationships on line the better off your site will be in the long run.
Here are ten steps to get you started.
- Buy a listing in a couple of the best directories. Yahoo, Business.com (B2B sites only), Best of the web and submit to DMOZ. This will cost you almost $600.00 but you will gain at least 10 permanent links spread out over several domains.
- Search Google for the top 100 ranking sites for your most important keyword. Do some research and create an article that you can offer in trade for a link. Get a link even if you have to buy it. If you do have to buy a link deal directly with the web site and not from a link broker. Google has been cracking down on sites that buy/sell links. Work this strategy and set a goal of getting one new link this way per week.
- Create a blog and create links from your posts back to your site. Try to post 2-3 times each week.
- Submit your blog to Blog directories like blogcatalog.com, eatonweb.com ($34.95 to add your blog) blogflux.com etc. Google “blog directory” for more places to submit to.
- Write and submit an article to a couple of the major article directories. Start with ezinearticles.com, articlecity.com and amazines.com. Google “article directory” for more places to submit to.
- Find something exciting about your business to write about. Write a press release and send it out through PRweb.com. Spend at least $220.00 and you will get at least 2 links but more than likely 10’s if not hundreds.
- Create a profile at linkedin.com. In the field "websites" use the search term that you want your site to be found under instead of the default “my website” You can add up to three links.
- Set up a lens at squidoo.com. Your lens will allow you to create links to your profiles and sites.
- Every time you establish a new link set a social book mark to the page it is on. There are hundreds of social book marking sites. Start with delic.io.us, backflip.com, furl.com and ma.gnolia.com Google "social bookmarks" for more. Spend some time searching for people to connect with.
- Ask everyone you are connected with at linkedin.com to comment on your latest blog post.
The daily ritual of shaving only takes a few minutes each day. Linking will eat up as much time as you will dedicate to it. But if you skip shaving or link building for very long you will start to look like a bum.
The guest post is provided by Terry Mickelson, founder of Page Views, Inc., one of the foremost search engine optimization companies specializing in B2B search engine optimization and link building programs. For further information as well as a free ranking report on your website, contact Terry Mickelson at 480-556-9752 or email reportrequest@pageviews.com
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Comments (20)
Terry – great post and I did learn somethings. You really know what you are doing and did not say it in your post, but listing items is really a great way to get people to your read your blog. Quick and easy, since most people on the net scan rather than read.
I would like your opinion or any other bloggers’ thoughts on posting on blogs that you find interesting, but is not related to your website. For example, your blog is about widgets, but your hobby is kite flying – two different topics – is posting a comment worthwhile for the ultimate back link?
When reciprocal linking was in vogue, it was easy for many site owners – just copy and paste – and hope you got a link back. Today, with blogging, writing a good comment is harder, because the poster needs to read the article and say something worthwhile.
Now the big question for you – did I add some value to your post?
Terry,
Very informative post and chock full of great tips and strategies. I can really compare getting good quality links to deciding to go on a diet. If you don’t decide to make it a daily habit, change your lifestyle and stay with it till you make it part of your daily routine you will fail and not accomplish much.
Too many Internet marketers listen to the so called “Guru’s” and expect to be Internet millionaire’s in a couple of weeks. Internet marketing and getting good quality inbound links is hard work, but well worth the time and effort.
Terry
Creating bullet points or lists is a great way to get a message out. One of the places this is really important is on dig.com where people quickly scan lists and write posts of their own on blogs etc.
I think it is a great idea to be involved in your communities. I post to bicycling, woodworking, entrepreneur and my local community sites frequently. I like to ask questions and share my opinions even if I don’t get a link back.
Yes Glenn, You did add value and thank you for taking the time to post!
Hi
Let me contribute my experience with my website as well:
Initially, when your site/blog is new, you have to build inlinks seriously. Thats what I did. In addition, I did some onpage optimization as well, for example, writing proper title and description for each webpage. And the result was that my website now shows up at the first position in Google with some keywords. Since the day it ranked so well, I noticed that many people liked the site which was evident by their putting our link on their websites/blogs. So the ranking in SERPs acted as a link bait….it helped in building inlinks naturally. This is the time I have relaxed a bit….at least for one month…..and after one month I noticed that the rate at which the inlinks grew, diminished. Now I am back to my daily shaving…..
B2B SEO – Thank you for your feedback to my post.
Manjit – It is nice to hear someone that does not talk about being sandboxed – you must have a really great site.
These are very wise words. It is the best way to get a site moving.
Little and often, write an article a day and submit it to article sites, or write a few meaningful comments on blogs, the blog finder software is excellent for that. A little something every day will make a massive difference.
In step #2, you say to only get one link a week via this approach? Seems a bit low, no? Or maybe it depends on teh scope of the site i am trying to rank. maybe one a day is better
also, is this the best way to get lots of new sites found quickly? social bookmarks?
please respond
Hi terry,
Thanks for a well written and precise how-to post!
My own experience in linkbuilding is, that is tough, time consuming and from time to time frustrating. It seems that many bloggers and small business website owners are afraid of linking to “competing” websites.
I made a website that I will work on as a hobby, since quizzes is one of my main interests. I try to make a community around this topic – but i have found that peers are hard to find. Either they don’t bother to answer my suggestions, or there are no humans behind the websites in the area at all:-) I guess they are scared to death of competition, all though there is not that much money in the field.
I don’t seem to understand my fellow website owners, so I have now created a link directory my self just to find out, how it works, what the consequences are inbound, outbound and in search engines for both websites – and my own emotions as well when competitors/peers start submitting links.
I am excited to watch the effects during the next year.
I think the most important thing is to have a plan and stick to it. Set yourself weekly goals for what you want to do in the way of building links and then mark those off as you accomplish them. Then keep track of the metrics of how many links you actually have. You will be motivated to see the number increase.
I still have yet to find out how linkedin works for link building. It seems to redirect links to my site.
On your point 8 about squidoo, i also have had good experiences with hubpages (equivalent as squidoo ). You guys may want to try it out
thats a cool relation to compare up both tasks, daily most tedious tasks you even don’t want to think about but you can’t live without (as a man and internet marketer/webmaster)..
Great post.
Relief for ladies on other part — lol
they won’t understand the trouble on man’s part for shaving
Just my 2 cents:-
1. Also joeant.com is a good directory and is only $40
2. Yes this is good advice – it’s mega-tedious (one a week is all I can manage anyway!) but the quality link partners are the ones who rank highly for your chosen keyword
3. Not sure about this blog one – since it’s the same IP address – just linking between the same sites several times I don’t think will have much more benefit than single links – but I might be wrong.
4. Agree
5. I find article submissions have less and less impact on your rankings these days (2008)
6 and 7 Good advice
8. squidoo is like an SEO-friendly Wikipedia
9-10. Good advice
Here’s what gets me about DMOZ – they often don’t even review sites that are submitted. I know this because I check my server logs to see if I get any visits from the dmoz domain. The usual excuse why your site isn’t included is because they deemed it inappropriate. How can that be, when they haven’t even looked at it? We’re talking sites that were submitted up to 5 years ago!! This is why I really do not like DMOZ. If you are going to run a human edited directory, have the decency to even take a glance at sites that are submitted. My advice is to go for the paid directories. Yes, they cost money but here’s the thing: they actually do what they say they will do: they review your site!
Regarding DMOZ, I do not find it usefull either. I don’t know what’s going on in DMOZ project, but either way – 6 months to up to 5 years review time is way too much for internet sites. They can change or disapear long befor being reviewed.
I have had much more succes with the alternatives above – and I haven’t had the time yet to follow up on all advices in this thread.
Terry –
Great Post! An action plan like this was exactly what I was looking for.
Kind of rough starting out in terms of getting reciprocal links, I like the idea in #2 of trading an article for a link.
I have heard that article directories are less and less important, but that ezinearticles still has some decent weight. So, I’m focusing all my purely article efforts just there. In fact, just a few days after a couple articles going live, google updated the toolbar PR and the two articles had a PR of 2!
I think I understand what you are saying for starting a blog. I’ve started a free blog at wordpress.com, and point that to my self-hosted blog.
Instead of squidoo, I’m using hubpages, as I’ve heard that might be a little better of a site. (I think once squidoo was penalized by google, and they’ve gone from following links, to nofollowing, then back again. Hubpages removes nofollow from links after writing a few good hubs. Not sure exactly when the switch happens, but I wrote 6 hubs and after 1 day my links had nofollow removed.)
Then again, I’ve heard a good strategy is to use multiple authority “community publishing” sites and do some cross linking between them, and point some back to your main site.
I just submitted to DMOZ a couple days ago, hopefully I get a link from there within a few years!!! Does anyone else have any good free or low cost directories to submit to?
Anyway, thanks for the advice, and I’ll intergrate this into the stuff I’m doing and really lay out a daily/weekly action plan.
Mike
One has to be careful about how much link building they do in a short period of time. If too many inbound links all come it at once, Google may think you are spamming.
This is the area that I find the hardest to keep up. I know that building links is the real key, and what I’ve done is to set up my day so that while I may have a goal to create a lot of links, I don’t let myself visit any forums or check my favorite web sites until I’ve created 1 or 2 links (depending on the difficulty, 2 if it’s blog comments, one for an article submission). Otherwise it’s too easy to find something else “important” to distract myself.
Ditto on the Hubpages. I’ve used both Hubpages and Squidoo, and the Hubpages seem to rank better, so I assume they have more trust with Google.
Link building one of the most important parts parts of making money online and getting that almighty organic traffic from Google is something I really need to work harder on. I do not know why I find it so difficult. That’s why I bought FBF so I could at least make my link building time more profitable. The more I use this tool, the more I cannot get along without it. I always seem to chose tough keywords to compete with so this means a lot of link building. At least Fast Blog Finder has taken the bite out of this.
My experience has been that link building needs to be an integral part of your marketing methods. One method that I noticed was left off involved RSS feeds. The blog that you create in step #3 will have an RSS feed that you can also use for link building. Submit the feed to various RSS sites and RSS aggregators. Every time you update the site or make a new post, the RSS feed is updated as well. Although most of the RSS feed sites don’t have a high PR, they do produce some good traffic. This method only takes a few minutes to implement, but continues to produce traffic for quite awhile.
Hey Terry – great post. We tend to favor shifting budgets from the directory/PR sites these days in favor of Facebook and other social sites. I guess that mix depends on your product mix and location of your market…