Once you realize how important inbound links or backlinks are to a successful website, you need to decide how to create more of them. Distilled to the simplest terms, put great content on your website and then let the world know about it. The voice from the corn in Field of Dreams said “Build it and they will come.” If there was a voice in Search Marketing of Dreams, it might say “Build it and they may come, if they know it exists. And enough links point them there.”
Eventually, we all realize we should actually ask people to link to our website. You might try to ask clients for a link. Perhaps explore your industry association member’s profile page for an opportunity to add a link. Develop partnerships with a provider of a related product. Do you notice a common element in these suggestions? There is always some relationship or logical connection.
I don’t recommend the following:
- Register to an online forum
- Make one post to request a reciprocal link
- Never visit again
Recently this happened at our search engine marketing forum.
The brand new member posted a generic reciprocal link offer for her website. It was polite enough to begin with “Dear Friends” before launching into the spam link pitch.
The best part? This individual said:
I think visitors would find this site to be a great resource because we offer…
Note the ellipsis. She never gave a reason, even a lame one, why it was a good resource. I had to chuckle and made a couple follow-up posts to point out the flaws in this method of increasing your inbound links. By the way, many forums (including ours) “nofollow” user-generated links. This means my new friend is not even getting the link popularity she may have presumed would result from her drive-by link dropping.
