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.

I know I’m breaking a cardinal rule of lists, here (you’re supposed have more bullets then the last one of it’s kind),  but I don’t think I can take another 101…301…1001+ ways to build links articles.  No matter what, there always seems to be a duplicate and it usually goes something like this:

#11 Get links from Social Media Profiles
…
#66 Get a link from your LinkedIn profile.

Isn’t that the same thing?  In fact, if your list is more than 3 (that’s right: 3) you sir, have too many.

Let me back up for a second.  It’s not that a long list of social media sites that provide ‘do-follow’ links isn’t helpful.  But if that’s the way you look at link building, you might be missing the point of why links matter in the first place.

So instead, I’d like to talk about just three (very general) strategies that you can utilize to build links to your site.  They are:

• soliciting for links
• adding your links to online editable content
• developing (your own) content for links.

First up: Soliciting for Links!

I’ve spent the better part of the past three years contacting webmasters for links to client sites.  The only thing I can say for sure about it is: It sucks!  It’s hard, tedious work.  And while sometimes rewarding, it can be extremely frustrating, ESPECIALLY if the client’s site isn’t… well…ready.

Some different types of link solicitations include: networking for links, directory submissions, article submissions, link trading, begging, bartering, and yes: paying for links (tsk, tsk).  It’s almost as boring to talk about as it is to do, so the only advice I’ll give on this type of link building  is this: Listen to webmasters who say “no”.  More often than not, if someone refuses your link request, there’s a reason.  It’s also likely that same reason might be why a potential customer won’t buy from you.  So consider fixing it.

Next up: Editing pages for links.

This is probably the most misunderstood method of link building.  It’s generally done one of two ways: either by adding your link to an existing page, or creating a new page and adding your link there.  This usually includes a healthy dose of: blog commenting, wiki editing, social media links, links from profile pages, and placing links in forums.  A good 90% (if not more) of these links carry the dreaded “no-follow” tag (meaning they don’t count as a vote in Google’s eyes).  But in all honesty, this type of link building isn’t going to get you much traction in the SERPS even if you find every do-follow blog/wiki/forum on the internet.  That’s not to say it DOESN’T work, but sending a computer to spam blog comments is not a serious link building strategy. (thus: “crap hat”)

So why did it even make the list?  Because dropping links this way can be integral when used in conjunction with the other two link building strategies.

Here’s an example: You’ve developed a blog and you desperately need to get links to it.  Go out and find similar blogs and start commenting on their posts and joining in on the conversation (quick tip: make REAL comments).  Be sure to include a link back to your blog in the comment (even if it’s no-followed).  Sooner or later, some bloggers will notice you and start reading your blog and commenting there too.  If they like what they read, before you know it, they’ll start linking to you!  If not, don’t be afraid to send a polite e-mail asking for a link. (once you’ve developed some trust..)

And that brings us to the third and final method: content development

It’s unfortunate that this tends to be the most ignored method for building links, because I believe it’s the most important.  Why?  Because it’s the way google want’s you to build links.  But it isn’t easy, and it starts and ends with the content of your web site.

So how does one go about “building” links simply by changing the content of their site?  The term “link-bait” usually comes up in this conversation but this only covers part of the strategy.  Put simply, it refers to the addition of content specifically designed to attract backlinks.  But there’s more to it than just that.

What it sometimes comes down to is simple: Is your site ready for link building?  If not, you may find that your link-bait isn’t attracting any links.  Remember those “reasons for the no’s” I talked about?  Fix them.  Haven’t started link building?  Do some usability testing and ask for qualitative opinions from your testers.  You can’t make all the people happy all the time, but if 9 of 10 thought a design feature detracts from your credibility, you’ll be losing links AND customers.

So once your site is “ready” now what?  Developing useful, resourceful, and otherwise interesting content can (and will) attract natural backlinks.  What makes this part hard is the content must be WORTHY of links.  Your every day top 10 list (or top 3) article just won’t cut it…give your users something they can USE and you’ll not only get links from it, but you’ll convert users to customers as well.

And really: this is how Google intended for links to determine rankings.  That’s why my next series of posts are going to be dedicated to content strategies that work for building quality backlinks that Google WANTS you to build.

So subscribe to our RSS Feed, there’s a lot to cover!