Are you in a bad neighbourhood? ABC1 link-building
We now know what the perfect link for SEO consists of. But we also know that the web is the inter-related linking of websites, so if we own a new site, how do we link-build in a way to build presence online?
New or Old, link-building is vital
The age of your site is irrelevant when considering link-building – it needs regular attention. Links, mean popularity, and search engines love popularity (oh, and relevancy!).
New website link-building
The hardest stage of any websites traffic development is post-launch. OK, if you're launching a product or service that is relatively new to the web, support the launch with the right PR thus creating a lot of direct traffic then the process can become a lot easier, but generally new sites tend to struggle with getting the organic traffic that they desire. This is because they struggle on search engine algorithmic trust factors. But a little bit of patience, a sprinkle of link-bait fairy dust, social interaction, and a great deal of hard work and your site will be flying along!
Social Interaction and Link-Building Plan
Before you launch your site, where do you want your site to sit within the web? Answering 'web design' for instance, would be too vague, maybe 'web design agency for small-to-medium-sized businesses around the Manchester area' would be a better answer. This is your website's purpose and essentially what you should build your link-building campaign around.
Community Spirit vs Bad Neighbourhoods
Your site is part of an online community / neighbourhood. This is the measure of how web relationships inter-relate online via links.
Looking at the image below TouchGraph helps visualise Flickr's (the social photo sharing site) relationships within it's own neighbourhood. From here, we can see that it is most closely associated to other social web 2.0 sites, including blogging sites, Wikipedia, Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and many others.
Iti s obviously worth looking at in closer detail by expanding this information, but this does go some way in understanding the prominence of certain relationships that Flickr, as an example, has.
What neighbourhoods are your neighbours in? Sounds like a daft question, as websites that are part of your neighbourhood. See who is linking to them. This extended-family approach is a good way of building-up a representation of your wider online community.
Social link-building
You've decided on the community that you want to be part of, now do some searches for your preferred terms and get social! If you have a new site, get the attention of others in your desired community by commenting on other's blog posts (more than “great post”, but something that adds value to the content), link-out attracts webmasters attention, contact other site owners, share ideas, offer to write guest blog posts using your expertise, get involved in community forums and web 2.0 social applications.
It's vital, that you actively participate in the communities where you ultimately want to influence and become the rising star! It takes time, but well planned SEO and link-building strategies always pay dividends in the end!
Add-value to your community
Link-bait is a massive topic, but briefly, for it to be effective it must add value to your target online community...what resources, content or tools would your community appreciate?
Link-building is often a bi-product of direct or indirect decisions and actions that you make on your website.
- Develop an on-site blog
- Create a section on your website for press releases
- Community-based online forum
- Offer free tools, software and services demos
- A research or open source development area
- Provide free training, tips, advice
- Humour - make people laugh!
...these all demand up-front resources as well as ongoing attention too, but organically created links add the greatest value long-term.
Optimising your website and link-building works. SEO helps maximise longevity in organic search engine traffic - and this is where the online traffic is. Is this where you want to be too?
Posted By: Ben
25 October 2008