Backlinks are extremely important to getting a good ranking in the search engines. Of all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that I know, I would rate this as the most important. Many people see this as a difficult task so I thought I’d share a few brief ideas to help you.
Articles
Articles are great for a number of reasons:
- You can submit them to multiple directories
- They continue to work for you over long periods of time
- They can be re-purposed
- You are in control of the link
- They’re easy to produce
I’ll address the last point first: they’re easy to produce. People make too much of article writing. They see it as this big obstacle to overcome so avoid it. In fact, anyone who’s serious about marketing online MUST master article writing at some point if they want to achieve everything that they can. It really doesn’t have to be hard – you only need about 500 words, which is less than one page!
Anyone who maintains a blog is also an article writer; most peoples blog posts are around the 400-800 word mark which would make great articles. In fact, I’ve re-purposed several of my blog posts as articles with only a few tweaks.
This is another great point: once you have the articles, you can use them to create other content, such as audios, videos or even social media sites.
Videos
It’s no secret that the search engines love videos. I’ve had videos rank on the first page of Google for my major search terms within 24 hours, which is next to impossible using any other technique that I know of. The most important things with videos are:
- Keep them short (5 minutes seems to be about right)
- Make sure you link to your site as the first thing in your description
- At the end of your video, tell people to click the link in your description
- Make sure your title is keyword optimized
- Submit to as many video sharing sites as you can find
If you follow these few tips, you’ll find that video can work really well for you, too.
Web 2.0
OK, so technically Web 2.0 encompasses video sites, but I like to separate them out for these purposes due to their ability to get ranked so quickly. In this section I’m talking about other sites such as Squidoo, HubPages, Scribd, etc. All of these (and similar) sites allow you to re-use your articles to build something new that generates additional backlinks to your site. If you make good use of them, they can have a huge impact on your search engine rankings as these sites too are rated pretty well by Google et al.
I would encourage you to take some time to consider your strategy for building backlinks to your primary sites. As I said, it’s still one of the best ways to improve your rankings and hence your organic traffic without the cost of PPC.
Please share your tips for gaining backlinks in the comments.
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