10 Link Building Strategies for Small Businesses

♠ Posted by Unknown in 10 Link Building Strategies for Small Businesses at 07:43

Not every website is the same, thus not every website’s link building strategy should be the same. To come up with your strategy you can study the link profiles of major competitors that established themselves in the niche before you did.

Below is a sample backlink analysis from a WooRank Website Project that shows backlink information in the form of a page URL, page title and linking anchor text.

The following are some legitimate link building strategies that have been tried and tested for small businesses:

1. Get a Blog:

Using a blog for link building is one of the latest trends in SEO. What makes you stand out in your niche is the quality of your content and the topics of your blog posts. Informative blogs on ‘useful tips’ and ‘lists of useful tools’ are usually a hit and creating blogs on controversial topics once in a while will grab the attention of fellow bloggers. Your blog page could invite both positive and negative views from experts in your niche, with the goal of setting you apart from all your blogging competitors. Writing on controversial topics may generate a buzz in your niche; ideally the content will then get shared on social media sites and receive many comments from readers. This increases the popularity of your blog. Read more about Blogging for SEO in one of our previous posts.

2. Internal link building:

Having a blog page associated with your website as either a subdirectory (www.yoursite/blog), a subdomain (www.blog.yoursite.com) or a separate domain (www.blog.com) gives you plenty of opportunities to link your content with your main site or link your blogs with each other. This internal link building is completely under your control, where you can choose your own anchor texts. This strategy also helps to promote your site for the targeted keywords found in the anchor texts interlinking your blogs.

3. Promote your blog’s RSS feed:

If you have a blog, you must have an RSS feed for it. Distribute your blog’s RSS feed in the following directories for free and earn links in return:

Blogdigger

Chordata

Feedagg

Feedburner

Feedage

Feedlisting

Feedmailer

Feedplex

Oobdoo

Plazoo

4. Guest Blog:

When you have your own blog it becomes easier to approach owners of other popular blogs in your niche, in order to gain guest blogging opportunities. Guest blogging is here to stay, as building links is not easy and this is a natural way to do it. Once you have built an initial reputation with your blog, you could showcase your expertise by sharing the link to your blog with webmasters you would love to guest blog for, thus gaining a link back to your website. Having your own blog also creates opportunities to exchange posts, thus building a mutually beneficial relationship.

You can find guest bloggers on the following sites:

MyBlogGuest

BloggerLinkUp

GuestBlogIt

BlogSynergy

GroupHigh

Guestr

BlogDash

PostJoint

CopyforBylines

BlogZone

Fizzniche

Triberr

GuestBloggingWebsites

5. Blog Commenting:

With Google Blog search you can find bloggers in your niche that share the same interests as you. Make a habit of leaving relevant comments on their blogs, in the form of praise or suggestions, in order to gain exposure in your niche community of bloggers. You can also occasionally drop a link in their comments, suggesting similar content featured in your own blog. Note: Dropping a link that connects to a content page is better than leaving a link back to the main, sales-driven part of your website. This can increase traffic to your blog and eventually increase link juice to your site as a whole.

 6. Article Sites:

Article directories were penalized as content farms when a lot of webmasters submitted the same low quality content to hundreds and thousands of article sites. The trend of mass article distribution is outdated but with a blog page of your own, you own the copyrights to your article and can syndicate shorter versions of your article on these article sites. There are some high quality article sites on the web where you can distribute segments of content from your original blog posts, written as teasers, and providing a link to your blog in the resource box to encourage visitors of the article sites to read more of your content.

Some of these article sites are as follows:

HubPages

Examiner

Buzzle

Technorati

Squidoo

eHow

EzineArticles

BrightHub

IdeaMarketers

7. Document Sharing:

Share content on document sharing sites. This is not limited to blogs but includes other promotional content that your company has produced as well, in the form of whitepapers, e-books, PDF’s, case studies or even restaurant menu cards. Drop a link in these shared documents, add relevant tags, give an apt title and description containing your target keywords and, on some sites, you can even write transcripts of your document with relevant keywords inserted in them.

Some of the popular online document sharing sites are as follows:

Slideshare

DocStoc

Scribd

Issuu

Esnips

AuthorStream

8. Press Release Marketing

Feature in Google News by releasing news about your company, product or service. You could also write a press release on a trending topic. Create a buzz at the right time by keeping an eye out for trending keywords on Google Trends. Press releases are often featured in the ‘News’ section on the first page of Google search results:

News on the First Page of Google Search Results

News on the First Page of Google Search Results

After you have created a press release, submit it to press release sites to gain links from them. The following are some reputed press release sites:

Webwire

Information-Online

BusinessWire

i-Newswire

PR

SBWire

PRNewswire

9. Infographics:

Although small businesses may not have time to strategize with content by planning designs for infographics, they can still use services offering free infographic templates. If you have some useful industry statistics or if you have data from conducting your own industry survey, do not bother explaining it in a boring, text-only blog. Use free infographic templates and offer your audience a colorful representation of the statistics. You can then post the infographic to your blog. Anyone else choosing to use your infographics can do so by embedding the code you provide, thus automatically producing a link back to your website. Here is a great post on the Top Three Infographic Tools for small businesses, all offered at no cost. You can gain more links by distributing these infographics to directories, such as:

InfographicsArchive

CoolInfographics

Infographicsshowcase

SubmitInfographics

Infographicsite

Visually

Reddit

Nerdgraph

InfographicLife

10. Get Social:

It is essential for every small business to have a blend of social media links in their link profiles because social signals play a very important role in boosting your search ranking. This is because social media involves real people and becoming popular among real people requires effort that is recognized and rewarded by search engine crawlers. There are many ways in which you can gather social signals. Some of them are listed below:

Social bookmark your blog or website on the following sites:

StumbleUpon

Reddit

Tumblr

Digg

Delicious

Create a brand page on the following sites:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google+

Get links from your Twitter profile by submitting it to Twitter directories. These sites are as follows:

Klout

Twellow

TwitterCounter

Twitaholic

Listorious

TweetLevel

FavStar

Here are some other miscellaneous social media sites where you can create a link back to your website from your profiles:

YouTube

Diigo

MisterWong

Pinterest

Flickr

Folkd

Ebaumsworld

Tagza

Newsvine

Blinklist

Chime.in

Bloglines

Netvouz

Social-Bookmarking

BuddyMarks

Oyax

SiteJot

Gozoof