Link Building Begins at Home

It’s easy to constantly repeat the same processes for building links, continuing to exhaust the same channels over and over again. However, a lot of leverage can be gained from analysing what links you already have and what opportunities your site can create. In this article we will discuss some different methods of making the most of these ideas.

Partner Links

There may be businesses you have close links with. For example, companies you supply to, websites which use resources you provide or event websites. It might be worth contacting these companies or websites to see if they would like to link to you. Web design companies do this a lot with websites they have developed; they place a link so visitors can find out who designed the website they are looking at. This method is good for gaining links and building brand awareness and you can offer something in return such as a testimonial.

There may also be local businesses/websites which would link to you if you provide a helpful service within the local area.

Links and Mentions

Conducting a thorough link analysis can highlight link opportunities on the web. Here are some tips and examples:

• Analyse the anchor text your site already has. You may have links that you already control which you can then go and change to have appropriately optimised anchor text.
• You may find that a website has linked to your website but the link isn’t that optimised. You could always contact your webmaster to see if they would change it.
• Bloggers may have discussed your company online, but not added a link. Ask these companies to link mentions of your brand name to help their readers learn more.
• There are a few tools online where you can track brand mentions (using Google Alerts for example); you can contact these websites to ask if they would provide a link where they have mentioned you.

Followers

If you have a social media following or an e-mail list, you can then have a detailed look into the different people who are already interested in what services/information you provide. An example would be to look at your Twitter followers; there may be a few who seem interesting, you can follow and interact with them and you could recommend that they read a recent blog post of yours if you feel they would be interested. This can be particularly effective if they ask a question you may have the answer for in one of your blog posts.

Followers are always good people to keep updated with new blog posts or services; they are more likely to then bookmark, tweet or link to your content.

Guest Posts

When analysing followers and links, you may uncover a few blogs who publish content related to your industry. These provide the ideal opportunity for guest posts; you can contact them to see if they would publish this exclusive content you have written in exchange for a link. You may be able to become a regular contributor.

Finding 404 Error Page Links

I have seen a few people talking about this method of link building recently. It is a process of finding a link on a website which no longer exists and offering a link to your website instead if yours provides a similar resource. As far as I am aware, there is not an easy method of scanning for these types of links. Let me know if you know of any!

Tools and Resources

If you provide a tool or resource which people can use on their own websites, you can request that they link back to you in exchange. An easy way of doing this is to provide embeddable codes; this makes it easy for someone to place the information on their website and makes sure that a link is included as long as they don’t edit the code.

And Finally… Listen

While analysing your current website, your followers and subscribers, it can be very rewarding to listen. You can find out what they are interested in, what they would like to see or what tools/resources they would find helpful. This provides the perfect opportunity to create helpful and targeted content and resources for your website. This is the perfect link bait for your website and can take your website to the next level.

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