3 Quick and Simple Link Building Techniques That Really Work
Most link building techniques are time-consumer, often resulting in little or no success. Read more...
Thankfully, there are lots of ways to speed up the process. These three quick and simple link building techniques are ideal for adding an extra dose of authoritative inbound links to your own, or a client’s, website.
Better yet; they’re completely ethical, straightforward, and legitimate. Despite the industry-wide fear of ‘easy’ link building techniques, these three strategies aren’t going to trigger any Google penalties or negative SEO effects. Win-win.
- 1. Use Google Image Search to find and negotiate with copyright infringers.
Every day, thousands of bloggers use Google Image Search to find, copy, and illegally use images they don’t own the rights to. You can call it whatever you like; ‘borrowing’, lending’, ‘using without permission’. The fact of the matter is, you are using an image that isn’t yours and this is stealing.
If you’re a digital artist or photographer, it’s very likely that your work has been lifted once or twice by a pesky blogger or two.
What do you do about it then? Why not use Google’s reverse image search feature to track down bloggers and webmasters that are misusing your images. Then, instead of threatening them with a takedown notice, send them a friendly email requesting an inbound link with attribution.
Most bloggers don’t want to start a fight, and they’ll happily comply with a friendly request for a link beside your photo. Smart SEOs can even use this strategy to build inbound links by creating infographics that they know will be stolen, and using them as an opportunity to score links from embarrassed and apologetic bloggers.
- 2. Use Open Site Explorer to find misspelled URLs and broken links.
Not all bloggers have enough time to double-check their links. As such, a lot of links that should be directed towards your website actually end up pointing to 404 pages and misspelled domains.
One of the easiest ways to score easy links is to plug variations of your domain name into SEOMoz Open Site Explorer. From here, it’s easy to write a quick email to all of the bloggers that have misspelled your domain name requesting a link revision.
Note: to save you the time of manually creating misspelled domain variations, give this free typo generator from SEO Book a try. For 404 links, try checking your page referrers and contacting bloggers directly requesting that they fix their links.
- 3. Reclaim text-only domain mentions that should be inbound links.
Nothing bugs a savvy-SEO more than a domain mention that forgets to include the http:// prefix. While most content management systems (CMS) fix links that only use www, few will edit text-only domains to point towards the page in question.
Thankfully, a simple Google search string can help you do this yourself. Type the text below into Google’s search bar (replacing the ‘yoursite’ domain with your own) for a full list of plain text mentions of your domain:
“-site:yoursite.co.uk -inanchor:yoursite.co.uk -inurl: yoursite.co.uk -intitle: yoursite.co.uk ” yoursite.co.uk”
From here, it’s easy to get in touch with bloggers and webmasters that mentioned your website but forgot to add a link. Discussion boards and blogs are often full of these plain text domain mentions, making them a great place to start on your quick and easy link building campaign.
So there you have 3 quick and simple link building techniques that really work. Now what are you waiting for, go ahead and try them out! Got some other techniques that you want to share? Let us know below!
This article was provided by Custard Media, the leading specialists in link building services. We build strong link profiles from relevant websites, and the best thing is we do all this whilst completely adhering to Google’s webmaster guidelines.