Summary: You can harness the power of content in your link building campaign by doing the following:
- Creating great content that people will want to link to
- Creating a small amount of killer highly original content
- Creating content for other people’s sites
So you’re looking for good quality links to your website to boost your page rank, gain targeted traffic and build trust in the eyes of the search engines. How can content help play a part in your linking strategy?
There are two ways you can use content to help you build links. The first is to create unique quality content on your website and try to obtain links to that. The second is to create unique quality content on other peoples’ sites (for example, article directories) and include a link back to your site. Both methods are valid. Let’s break these down further.
Create great content on your website
It’s not difficult to fathom that if you create exceptional content on your website that people will want to link to it. Other websites don’t link to you to help you make money – they link to you because there’s a reason – in this case, they feel your site will be beneficial to their visitors.
Of course, it’d be great if you made fabulous content and then people just linked to you without you having to do anything further. But unless you have a high traffic site where people visit every day looking for new content, it’s unlikely to happen. So you need to take on the responsibility of promoting your content.
There are a number of ways you can do this – asking other websites for links, writing mini articles on the topic (for example, on article sites) and linking through ‘for more information’, bookmarking pages on sites like Site Reference or Digg, establishing yourself as an expert in a particular field and linking from your profile to your articles – and so on.
Create killer content
Creating a good quality article (like this one) is likely to encourage linking to your site using the above strategies. But this article is just one of many on link building, and nothing particularly revolutionary. If instead you produce a single amazing article (or set of amazing articles) you’ll find it far easier to get links to your pages.
You can do this by answering a question that simply hasn’t been adequately dealt with on the web, providing a solution to an unsolved problem, carrying out unique research in your field of expertise, and so on. Once your content has been spidered and ranked well, consider creating a summary version of the article and allowing other sites to reproduce it under licence, leaving in place a carefully constructed signature which links back to your site (and to your main article).
Create content for other peoples’ sites
As noted above, a good way to spread the word about an article is to create a unique mini version of the article on article directories, and then link back to the main article from there. In return for writing an article, you’ll get a link back to any page you choose from your site, and you can usually control the anchor text of that link – bonus. Don’t forget the importance of relevance – you need to make the article relevant to your site and the link relevant to your site. The value of the link to your site will be far higher if you follow this.
Make sure you don’t distribute articles that are already on your website. Whilst search engines will usually pick your article up first and rank that the highest, sometimes they make mistakes!
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