Link Blog

By Jake Lowrey

Writing at Search Engine Land, Debra O. Mastaler offers her version of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders including the need to stay on top of trends in your particular industry, the value of patience and leveraging cross-channel marketing.

All great ideas, but we are going to focus on her #4 - "Make content, not war."

She writes: "The easy part of link building is knowing that you need them. The hard part is influencing the right people to give them to you without making it look like you asked. Good content attracts links on it own." Then goes on to list five excellent ideas to attract links via content.

One of these - "Develop a blog and update it at least 3x a week" - we've previously covered. The others, along with our comments, are listed below. We have numbered them for your convenience.

1. "Don't send your content away to an article directory, build a library on your site and stock it with your articles."

We are great proponents of article writing, with one caveat. If you do not have the skills to write a well-informed, coherent article, don't do it. There is nothing worse than a rambling, pointless article full of grammatical errors. Such an article will have the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish - it will drive people away!

Unless you have formal training in writing, or have had success with your writings in college, we suggest before publishing a self-written article on your web site you show it to a trusted friend, or better yet, to a former teacher or professor.

Once you establish your library of articles, you can begin to promote it through industry-specific forums and blogs and through news releases. You should begin your self-promotion with as few as two or three articles. Just be sure to add to the library on a regular basis so people have a reason to link to you.

2. "Create a glossary for your industry, promote it with the media when it's complete."

Every industry has their own jargon. Providing on your site a list of terms and their definitions used by your particular group offers an excellent opportunity for the attraction of links. You may want to rephrase the definitions in your own voice to make it stand out. In addition, take the opportunity to link from the definitions to some of your internal pages that can help illustrate the meanings.

3. "Design a widget or put together a free promotion using one of your products."

Most of us are not code writers, so designing a "widget" is beyond our skills. If you can't talk one of your friends who writes code into designing something for you, then use the free promotion aspect.

You may even want to make it a regular feature of your site, say, weekly or monthly. You can either offer a buy one, get one free promotion, or sponsor a contest. It could be something as simple as asking visitors to send in ideas on how to best use the product with the top idea as the winner. You may even want to post some of the ideas and have your visitors vote. Use you imagination; the possibilities are limitless.

You can even use some of the generated ideas to create new content for your site.

4. "Take a picture of every item you own and create a photo library on your site to hold them. Allow anyone to use the photo provided they leave the embedded link intact. Look into submitting photos with Creative Commons."

This has to be one of the most creative ideas we've seen in a long time. Two things we'll add to this. One, make sure there is only one item in each photo unless, of course, it is a group of items. Two, add written descriptions of each item and perhaps a bit of history for additional content.

Of course, as with the article library, be sure to promote your new content with news releases and on industry forums.

Jake Lowrey has communications experience as a news reporter, editor and public relations professional. Current assignments include writing for Team Link Network.