Getting links to your site is crucial if you don’t have a massive marketing budget and there are plenty of opinions on how to get back links. The best links, though, are natural links that you’ve attracted by having great content and here are a few ideas on creating content that will attract natural links.
Anyone who is involved in running a website will already know the importance of getting back-links to their site. How to achieve this without resorting to spammy techniques, however, is another matter and one of the most common questions you’ll see posted on web master and business forums is ‘how to get back inks to my site?’.
Quite often you can predict the answers that these posts attract – forum posting, social bookmarking and link swaps are often the favourite responses. While these may indeed help you get your site noticed you would be wrong to adopt this as long term strategy.
The way to get links that really matter is add content to your site that attracts links naturally. OK, you may say, that’s all well and good but how do you actually do this?
Quite simply, you need to post content that is useful, interesting or controversial. Your aim should be that when someone sees the article on your site they’ll want to share it with others. Here are a few examples:
New Products
Whatever business you operate there will usually be new products and innovations released on a continual basis. Your potential customers and fellow businesses will want to know about these innovations and will be looking for information. So why wait for someone else to publish a review or specification?
By being one of the first and most authoritative sites to mention a new product you could well attract links from a whole range of websites.
Post a few large images (you’ll often find these on the manufacturer’s own site in their press section) and use file names and alt tags that feature the product’s name and description. You’ll be surprised how many people look for images of new products and you could feature highly in search results for this alone.
Whoever the main manufacturers are in your sector – check their press releases and set up a news alert so you can be first out of the gate when a new product is released.
Top Ten Lists
If you regularly read a newspaper or magazine then you’ll know how popular top ten lists are for creating compelling content. The ten best books for children, the ten best winter coats, 10 netbook applications, ten ways to ask for a date – whatever your sector, you can apply this principle for creating content.
If you use your imagination and create a list that will be useful to someone else then they’ll want to share it with others.
Tutorials
This may not apply to a lot of sites but for some it could be appropriate. Is there an application or software product that you have specialist knowledge about?
For example, a lot of people use WordPress for blogging and for affiliate sites and will be often looking for tips and advice. Another example could be photography, do you know of any special techniques that you could write about? Whatever area you specialise in there will be people looking for tips and advice.
Controversy
According to the old adage, there is no such thing as bad publicity – well it’s probably not a good idea to take this idea too literally but there is some truth in this. Controversial subjects can include atheism, feminism, politics or celebrities. Having a strong opinion on any of the above will often attract some coverage somewhere and these tend be the areas where high profile bloggers are most active.
You don’t have to be too extreme to get noticed, for instance, an article titled: ‘What to buy an atheist for Christmas?’ will attract some links to your site very naturally. Use your imagination, try to be original and you’ll be surprised how successful this technique sometimes can be.
As you will appreciate, there is no simple way to get great back links but using a little imagination and not copying what everyone else is doing will help you to stand out from the crowd, get noticed and, hopefully, attract some links that will stand the test of time.
