Getting other webmasters to link to your web site isn’t easy, but if you’re not doing everything you can to make your site attractive to the linking web, you’ll find it downright frustrating.  In marketing, the goal is to make your business attractive to targeted consumers, but for link building, you need to think of it as marketing to webmasters.  And believe me, webmasters are a much more difficult group to impress.

So before you start a long link building campaign, you need to take a good look at your site from a slightly different perspective.  The good news is: most of the same marketing principles apply, but this time, the emphasis becomes: “would I link to this” instead of “would I buy this”.

I broke the checklist down to three major categories:  SEO, Design, and Content.  Using the cliché pyramid diagram concept, SEO is the base.  It’s the strategy, the reason you’re link building in the first place, and foundation for making the most of the links for rankings. Design falls in the middle section.  This covers the subliminal trust cues and little nuances that can either make or break a link deal. Finally, content sits at the tip of this completely unattractive shape.  It’s your hook, or the ‘reason’ webmasters link to your web site.

Below is an outlined checklist of the areas you should re-visit before you begin link building, with a link to the corresponding description.

Click on the topic to see the description below:

SEO

• Keyword research
• Target Page Strategy
• Internal Linking
• On-Page SEO

Design

• Usability/Find-ability
• Compelling design
• Trust Cues

Content

• Link worthy content
• Area for regular content
• Brush up your offering!

SEO – Making the most of your back links for SEO benefit is crucial. Building links to a web site with poorly executed SEO may not only make achieving rankings difficult, it could end up causing more work for you (or your SEO) in the long-run.  Getting this part right from the beginning is (I’ll say it again) crucial.

Keyword research – Choosing the right keywords for your SEO campaign is the very first step and probably the most important.  It’s not always about how often a search phrase is used, however.  What it comes down to, is choosing the phrases consumers are searching for when they’re looking for the specific product or service you offer.

This isn’t only important for your on-page SEO, either.  Keyword rich anchor-text is one of the most important ranking factors for back links.  Trust me: if you take the time to get this part right, you’ll thank yourself later.

Target Page Strategy – Once you have your keywords, you need to lay out how your site is/will be structured in order to target each phrase.  While a single page can rank for multiple keywords, your homepage probably can’t cover them all.  Take your keyword list and create mock site-map with a natural categorical hierarchy that makes sense to your users.  Don’t be afraid to group synonyms on the same page.  Having variations for anchor text is important so make sure you have more than 1 keyword per page, but try and limit it to around 3-4.

Internal Linking – Once you have your page strategy in place, now you need to create a internal link navigation so that users (and search engines) can find these pages.  As a general rule: the more important the keyword phrase, the more internal links you’ll want pointing to that keyword’s page.  In other words: if your homepage targets your top keyword phrases (as it usually should) you will want every page of your site linking back to the homepage.

Internal anchor text (text used as the link) can be important too.  Using targeted keyword phrases to point to the respective page is a good way to tell the search engines what the page is about.  Don’t over-do this, however: use variations!  If every internal link points to a page with the same anchor text as every back link to that page, you’ll ‘over-optimize’ and actually start seeing rankings drop.

On-Page SEO – This is the part where you put keywords in the title tags, meta description, and meta keywords right?  Well, yes…but first, what’s on the page?  If it’s just a picture of your product with the same description that can be found on about 1000 other websites, don’t waste your time.  Unique text is what SEO’s sometimes call “spider food”.  The search engines eat it up; and without it, your page may end up in google’s supplemental results and consequently rank for nothing.

Oh yeah, and having keywords in: the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, image alt text, image title, content, H1, H2, H3, bold, and italicized…may or may not help you.  Consult your SEO.

Design – Is design really important for link building?  Yes.  It is.  It’s not that a poorly designed web site can’t get links; it’s that a site with the right design should project trust and authority and simply be MORE LIKELY to get that link.  Remember, we’re marketing to webmasters, here.  They can be picky about small design features like target=“_blank”, for example.  I’ve actually lost a link because a client used target=“_blank” for all external links.  On the other side of the coin, however, I’ve seen plenty of links purely on the basis of a great design.  So: Yes, it’s very important.

Usability/Find-ability – I love the word find-ability.  I believe it should be the goal of any webmaster to have users find what their looking for on their web site.  So while most web savvy people may be smart enough to figure out your complicated navigation, if at any point they become frustrated, they’ll leave quicker than you can say “heat map testing”.  Consequently, this will lose you both customers AND links.  Usability testing is so important yet so largely ignored…and I bet most people don’t know it could help them build more links!

Compelling design – Whenever I see the default version of the wordpress theme, I instinctively hit the back button.  You lost me.  It’s not that it’s ugly, or wrong.  It just tells me that you took as little time with the design of your site as you could, and your content probably reflects that.  You don’t have to spend ten thousand dollars developing a website to attract links; but the design is your face, and a beautiful clean design is much more attractive to the linking web than that free-css-template you just downloaded.

Trust Cues – This is a phrase I like to use when describing why design and usability are important for attracting links, but there’s more you can do; and not do for that matter.  Adding awards, certifications, trusted affiliations, and recommendations will add to the trust and authority that your site projects.  Adding these trust cues will not only improve your conversion rate, but it will also (say it with me!) help attract more links.

What not to do?  You will detract from your site’s trust by adding too much advertising or simply trying to be too forceful with your call to action.  Not every sentence needs to be a sales pitch.  Keep information: information, and sales copy: sales copy.

Content – The real trick to attracting links comes down to what’s on your site.  What are you offering that’s so worthy of having other webmasters willingly link to you?  What are you doing to improve and add to it?  The bottom line: you need to have something to offer webmasters or they’re probably not going to give you that link you asked for.

Link worthy content – I mentioned hooks before, and it’s a very good way to describe the “angle” of your content (call it link bait).  Do you provide information?  News? Resources?  Entertainment?  A new perspective?  Or were you thinking people would just willingly link to your e-commerce store?

More important than the hook type, however, is the quality of your content.  Paying $5 per article from someone who speaks English as a second language probably isn’t going to do much for attracting links.  Your content needs to be remarkable.  Not just good.  Remarkable.

Area for regular content – Yes, a blog will do nicely.  It doesn’t necessarily NEED to be a “blog” but you get the idea.  If you don’t have a section on your site that’s dedicated to both reaching out to new and regular users & adding fresh and new link worthy content, add one today!  You can have a working wordpress blog running in less than 5 minutes, so you have no excuse.

Brush up your offering! – How does an SEO tell their client or manager, the product or service, (or even the price) you offer is hurting their rankings?  How dare they!  Webmasters are a smart bunch and I have a great story about how this is actually possible:

A link ninja once came into my office and said,

“Todd, we have a small problem.  I asked this guy for a link and he did it, but meanwhile he sorta trashed the company…”

When I went to the page, it seems he had done some price comparison and found that our client had such bad prices, it made sense to him to do a bash post on his blog about it.  We got the link, but also created an ORM problem (to no fault of the link ninja) for the client.  So while this specific instance didn’t ‘hurt’ their SEO, you can imagine how many links it potentially lost them.  Since then, the client updated their service and prices to compete with the current market, and the links started to come much easier…go figure.

If you liked this article, subscribe to our RSS feed.  Next week I’ll be getting into some more specific ways to target your content for links.