A very big part of marketing online – especially in competitive markets where we want to get our informational websites in front of those who desire our information the most is seo – which is composed of a combination on-page factors and off-page such as link popularity.
I’m sure you’ll agree that we hear much more in terms of advice for improving our seo rankings, ways to improve our page rank and get more traffic to do with on-page factors such as optimizing our copy, using the proper keywords and various page structure elements that are believed to influence page rank and overall search engine optimization.
Once in a while you may come accross less than desirable techniques for obtaining reciprocal links or even have someone try and tell you ways that you can buy links to improve your link popularity – even though the major search engines typically catch up with these techniques and eliminate the advantage if not apply a penalty.
Link popularity is certainly important and there are some very powerful things you can do to improve the liklihood that you will not only get more inbound links naturally, but that they will be of benefit to your audience and highly relevant in terms of your business.
Which leaves us with the question, how DO we boost link popularity – what choices do we have as online marketers?
Here are six techniques we have pulled from our highly regarded Information Product Profits Video Training Program where we keep top online marketers in touch with the latest tips, techniques and strategies for growing powerful information marketing businesses online:
1. Great Content – it all starts with generating content that deals with a topic in such a good way that other related publishers decide that it’s not worth it to try and re-create this content, why not just link to yours? By great content I don’t mean you have to spend days developing 10’s of pages of content, it could simply be a very succinct 4-5 paragraph answer to a compelling question your market has. When I’m developing content I like to develop a quick list of questions I see my market asking on discussion forums or social networks – that way I know I’m developing content around topics that are current and in-demand – link worthy if you will.
2. Start a WordPress or Blogger blog and ping some of the larger directories. While nobody understands the search engine weighting or exact techniques for assessing inbound links, there is weight given to legitimate blog directory listings which will get you some initial link popularity.
3. Share content…identify some of the top players that also target your audience but do not directly compete with you – find out how they share content with their audience (blogs, discussions forums, articles, newsletter, etc…) and offer to swap content with them with each of you linking back to the originator’s site – you are giving credit for the content and best of all, the links are highly relevant and are surrounded by top quality content which can enhance your link popularity.
4. Release viral tools such as special reports, software widgets, document checklists and templates which get picked up by other authority sites in your marketplace and will link back to you adding to your link popularity and overall SEO. For example, a few years ago I had produced a free excerpt report from my main ebook that I allowed other partners to post on their site where they would link back to me as the original source of the content. I still get a great deal of traffic from these links today.
5. Add your links to social media sites such as Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit and others. Treat this approach with caution – you don’t want to be submitting every piece of content you develop daily, a better approach is to take your highest quality material and submit it to the directories as well as using these social directories to tag other sites you find interesting and useful.
6. Press releases. Since the search engines are always trying to bring the highest quality, most legitimate content to the top of their search results, it would make sense that they weight incoming links to your site from authority and high quality sites that indicate you are a quality source of information. Typically press releases are only submitted by higher quality content sources so by adding a quality press release with inbound links back into your site you can certainly help your link popularity.
Two final words of advice, focus on developing quality content targeted at proven desire within your marketplace and take some time to study the content that is rising to the top of the search engines to understand what types of content you should be focusing on to both rank highly and gain link popularity.
