Link-Building Strategies for Online Marketing

Link building is a time-intensive, tedious, monotonous, potentially expensive, sometimes confusing, often rewarding, always powerful marketing strategy.  It is the Darth Vader of marketing.  There’s a lot of pain to it, but there is plenty of good hidden inside as well.

I suppose a better comparison would be a fattening candy-bar, but I like king-size Snickers more than I like to deal with link-building when I’m trying to tackle an online marketing project.

Knowing where to start can be daunting all by itself.  If you talk to someone who has never worked with link building you’re likely to get the first thing that pops into their mind, link swapping.  Either that, or a blank stare.  Having a conversation with a catatonic person is less than appealing.  If you have found yourself in that situation before, you’re not alone.  Everyone starts somewhere.

Let’s take a look at the 8 different types of link building for online marketing, this will give you a foundation on what strategy would be best suited for you and your project.  I’ll use the term “scalability” a lot because link-building is a lot like climbing or scaling a mountain.  That and I like comparisons to big, over-emphasized obstacles.  It scares new people.

Manual Link Submissions – This is probably one of the most tedious methods.  It’s a practice with low scalability.  It takes a lot of work to visit sites that fall into categories relating to your product or service.  The research it takes to locate the most popular sites in your niche can be a massive “time suck”.  Then you have to initiate a personal contact with the owner or webmaster and essentially give them a “dude, link to me!” request.  Petitioning another site, like a blogger or review site, can be a little spammy so it’s important to be personal and avoid anything that sounds like a canned letter or request.

Fortunately, when you do get links, they are often quality links that will generate great traffic to a target audience you have personally selected.  You’re going to have do your research on those sites where you request a link.  Make sure they’re a good source of traffic and rank well on their own.  If search engines, like Google, view their links and content as inferior or spammy, then their reliability drops and Google stops indexing it.  You don’t want your site in any way related to another website that gets shot down by Google and other search engines.  It is guilt by association in its most stereotypical form.

Competitive Link Research – It is essential to know who your competition is, and it is even more beneficial to know who they are in bed with… so to speak.  Using various tools online, you can analyze the competitors URL and find out who is hosting links to their site.  With a comprehensive list of sites where your competition is listed, you are able to petition those sites to link to you as well.  It’s still a tedious, manual submission process but you’re directly competing with other popular sites in your market.  Just remember to check the quality of traffic and the page rank of the site before requesting a link.

Links through Embedded Content – This is any form of content, or object, embedded directly into a page that links back to another site.  A prime example would be Youtube clips, Facebook badges, and Twitter widgets.  Twitter widget? It’s similar to a whozziwhat’sit.  As advanced as technology can get, the names we tack to things never ceases to amuse.  Dr. Seuss would be proud.

Embedded content offers endless possibility for viral marketing, especially when you consider the ability of every visitor to ‘share’ the content.  A key feature is your ability to craft the anchor text and design the links to point where ever you like, giving you complete control over the target points.

Link baiting and viral campaigns – Link baiting sounds a bit off color, like a shady practice.  It’s not, however, and quite legit.  It’s also become more and more common in online marketing.  Link baiting is really just content or copy placed on a website with the specific intention of gathering as many unique outside links as possible.

Whether you purchase copy or write it yourself, it can be a valuable method for driving traffic to your site.  This is growing in popularity once again within the blogosphere, as companies pay to have professional blogs produced.  These blogs cover content relevant to their products and services, and that content points directly to landing pages within their business network.

It’s not uncommon to have similar informational content produced for a simple website, with strategic keyword use and placement to optimize search engine indexing.  There’s no way to know whether or not content you put up will go viral, but if it is picked up by the masses then the short-term traffic explosion is always great for business.

Linkbaiting also has low scalability, as content production or even posting purchased content can be long-suffering.  Likewise, traffic takes time to build and this is a passive campaign.  The links you do get will almost always be placed on sites that are relevant to your goods and service, so you can expect a higher quality of click-through traffic.

Content Syndication – If you have the ability to do so, you can syndicate your content for other sites to use.  This is a shaky area, as mismanagement and poor tracking can just lead to duplicate content listings that could backfire on you.  If you syndicate to only a few big sites, search engines may see you as the duplicate content and bust down your listing.  In this case, having more is always better in all aspects.  You’re generating quality links by having your content link back to you, and with your content on multiple sites the search engines will index properly and view you as the originator of the content.

With top of the line content, you may even become a source for good copy, where other businesses come to you specifically requesting content.  The scalability varies, and the link quality can be questionable depending on the number of sites where your content is displayed.

Partnership, Exchanges, and Trades – One of the oldest forms of marketing, especially in the days of the old Blogosphere.  It boils down to this: “You put my link on your site, and I’ll put your link on my site”.  While this is still practiced in some aspects by smaller websites and blog owners, it’s more common with affiliate programs, such as Amazon.  Search engines generally view these as good links as well, and not at all spammy.  This means  the links you do get will be more appropriately indexed to help with the link-weight of your domain in the eyes of major search engines.

The scalability is a bit higher, as Affiliate programs are often easily managed.  Unfortunately, the quality of the links are far lower than other standard practices.  This may or may not affect the traffic that could come through those links.  A lot is left to uncertainty.

Paid Links – It’s just not a good practice.  While you may get lucky and garner some notable traffic through paid links, more often than not you’ll end up throwing money away.  The risk that comes with paid links outweighs any remote benefit, as Google and other major search engines are regularly adjusting their metrics to weed out links that resembled paid spots, tagging them as irrelevant and tossing them to the wayside.  Having your own link marked as spam could lead to your domain being tagged and removed from indexing/listing.  In the long run, you could end up being forced to rebrand your site with a new domain.  Essentially, you’d be starting from scratch.

Link Reclamation – This is a good practice for everyone, and should be part of your regular tracking.  There are many tools online that will take your URL, and find other sites that list poor or broken links to your content.  You can contact those websites and make appropriate adjustments to correct the link listing.  The benefit comes when you begin examining competitors.

If you can find links that are broken or link to content that is out of date you can petition the listing site to update the link so that it points to your website instead, promising pages that exist (no more broken links) or new, updated and relevant content (as opposed to the competitions out of date copy)

Each strategy has it’s pros and cons, and will require a significant investment in time through implementation and tracking.  There’s no question, however, that if you want to increase your listing within the search engines it’s essential to add link-building to your online marketing campaign.

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