Link Building Outside the Box

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If you’ve used traditional link building strategies and find yourself running out of ideas, maybe it’s time to do a little brainstorming. To help you get started, this article will clue you in to some underused but powerful ideas for generating buzz and traffic for your web site. Feel free to mix and match or use them as jumping-off points.I owe a lot of the ideas I’m about to describe to Kim Roach at Zany Pixel. Roach wrote an amazing article on unusual link building strategies. I won’t have room to examine them all here, so I urge you to pay a visit to the site. You may come away with just the idea you need to really kick-start your traffic.

My first idea, however, comes from Hamlet Batista. He advocates giving something away. Giving goodies away is a time-honored tradition when it comes to marketing, from the little prizes in cereal boxes to the swag-filled days before the first dot-com bust. But how is giving something away going to get you links? It depends on how you do it.

Say you run a content-based site that features reviews. If you’ve just run a really good review of something – a restaurant perhaps, or a video game, or an electronic device – why not contact the manufacturer (or game designer, or restaurant owner) and let them know? They’ll be delighted to hear about the good review…and if you suggest that they accept a virtual “badge” or “trophy” that links back to the good review on your site, you will more than likely get a very nice one-way link.

This idea can be adapted in a variety of ways. Here’s a spin for not-for-profit educational organizations: in addition to all the educational data you provide on your site, include a number of tests. Let visitors take the tests. If they score particularly high, give them a virtual “award” at the end of the test that they can post to their blog. It gives your site another link, and gets the word out to the blog’s readers. True, not everyone who is online has a blog, but they’re common enough these days to make this worthwhile.

You know about Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal, of course, and then there are the blogs on social networking sites that aren’t quite as blog-focused. But did you know that you could start a blog on eBay? I didn’t either, but here’s the home page for eBay Blogs.

If you think nobody would use eBay Blogs for anything more than getting the word out about the latest items they’ve posted for sale, think again. SEO expert Jim Boykin started an eBay blog. He has only one entry, but it’s very informative for anyone who is trying to sell goods on eBay and is looking for an edge. The entry links back to his main blog, so anyone who’s really interested can find out a lot more. It’s worth noting, by the way, that eBay apparently doesn’t force bloggers to use the rel=”nofollow” tag. Just keep your desired keywords/anchor text in mind and get to work.

I talked about giving virtual trophies away earlier. Trophies tend to imply contests of some kind, and holding a contest in your blog is a great way to attract traffic and links. There are even specific sites set up where you can promote your blogging contest. Roach lists no fewer than 15 sites, including Contest Blogger, The Prize Blog, SYC and My Blog Contests.

Don’t underestimate the potential benefits of running a contest on your blog. Ben Cook wrote an article a few months ago in which he explained the benefits of the contest he’d just finished running in his blog. The contest’s explicit purpose was building links to help push his site up in the SERPs. Thanks to the contest, he got his site ranked as high as fourth for his chosen key phrase in Yahoo. At the time he wrote the article, he’d settled down to 46th in Google and 37th in Yahoo for the phrase, but that gave him a good base to build on. The contest also brought hundreds of visitors to his site at a time when it was less than three months old.

If you want to inspire some interesting responses and conversation along with those links, try to think of a way to make the contest just a little off-beat. Make your contestants work, but not too hard. Photo contests seem more likely to go viral and inspire lots of entries than other kinds of contests, perhaps because digital photography has made it so easy these days. Encourage your entrant to send in a short description along with the photo – search engines can’t see images without something in the alt tag, but they can crawl any other text you put on the page, so this way you get relevant text along with the image.

By: seochat.Terri