If you’re a B2B blogger, you know that links are the currency of SEO. Building credible, authoritative and relevant links back to your blog is an excellent way in which to tell the search engines that your blog is valuable to their many customers (i.e. searchers) and needs to be ranked accordingly.
But you also know that link building is not an exact science. Despite the fact that they work through algorithms constructed by meticulous geeks, search engines tend to be flaky and subjective when it comes to compiling their rankings, and keeping up with their ever-changing tweaks can be quite a task.
The following tips and ideas will help ensure that your link building strategy doesn’t run aground.
1. Remember, quality trumps quantity
As with any business endeavour, and most things in life, you’re better off focussing on building a few, high value links than trying to pepper the web with as many links as you can create. In the world of search engines, status is everything, so take time targeting a handful of sites that you know to be influential.
2. Find out who’s linking to your competitors
If you’re a serious blogger, you will know who you’re up against – who’s blogging to the same audience as you? Who’s trying to hog your subject spotlight? Then find out who is helping them by identifying links to their blogs (go to yahoo and type ‘links:’ followed by the URL for a list). These sites will likely be easy targets for your own links.
3. Become a guest blogger
By finding complementary sites and offering your expertise as a blogger in exchange for a link, you will be building your own blog’s profile as a leader in the sector. Be sure to provide a reciprocal link to reinforce your blog’s relationships in the eyes of the search engines.
4. Register with blog directories
While the quantity of blog directories has exploded over the past few years, the quality has really floundered. This means that finding directories that are worth registering with requires a bit of digging, but this remains an important element of a link building strategy.
5. Request links where you probably deserve them
If you’ve gone to the trouble of reviewing someone’s product or blogging about their event, take the time to drop them an email asking them to link to your post from their website.
6. Use article marketing
Rewrite some of your blog posts into articles for free article submission sites. Many of these allow links and some can be well optimised.
7. Publish something unique and newsworthy
Create a survey or an index and invite an online news site to run the story with a link to your blog. This might be hard work, but it does tend to pay off as these are links that your competitors will struggle to imitate.
8. Offer awards
Create a badge that links back to your blog, and award it to top achievers in your target field. This is a win-win situation: they get recognised for their hard work, while you get your link.
9. Pick up the phone
So many B2B marketers forget about the old fashioned dog-and-bone. If you’ve identified a website that holds some authority in your sector call the webmaster and ask what it takes to get a link. You’ll probably be surprised at how receptive they are to being approached in this manner.
10. Make your blog worth linking to
If your content is super and your blog meets a need that no other blog even comes close to, you’ll find webmasters, journalists and the Twitterati simply won’t be able to resist linking to it. This is, of course, a best case scenario, but one to aim for.
What are some other strategies you have used to build links to your B2B blog?
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Source: Social Media B2B
