Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University
It’s time for Part 2 in my series on Link Building Tactics. As I mentioned before, links are an important part of Google’s algorithm – if you don’t have links to your site, you won’t rank well for your keywords. Last month I wrote about how you can check the real number of links coming into your website and how you can use that information to build relationships and generate even more links (Link Building Tactics Series – SEO University).
Today I want to continue the series and talk about the most basic component of generating links which is:
Write Quality Content
If you want people to link to you then you need to write content that is worth linking to (also known as “linkbait”)! Create interesting, relevant content that your target audience would find valuable. Identify what pains or problems your customers / readers are facing and give them solution that is easy to digest and makes them curious to learn more.
So What?
Your content should answer the question So What? Why should readers care what you are writing about? Your customers are bombarded with more websites and articles than they know what to do with! Unless your content can answer the So What? question, readers will move on to find an expert who will.
300-500 Words
How long should an article be? A guideline that I always recommend is at least 300 and aim for 500. If the article is below 300 words then it’s harder to get picked up in the search engines. 500 seems to be an ideal number because it’s enough to get your thoughts out on a specific topic. Keep your articles short and focused. If you’re writing over 1,000 words it’s better to split the content up into two 500+ word articles. This way your articles will be more readable, will stay focused on one topic, and you can get more search engine traffic to two shorter articles than one long one.
Look To Niche Social Networking Sites
To get ideas for what topics to cover and how to position your content check out a niche social media sites that caters specifically to your audience. For example, if you target small business owners, you would want to look at BizSugar.com.
A quick glance at their Hot Topics show what small business owners are currently interested in. It will also show you the types of titles that attract attention. The titles of the top 5 articles are:
- Franchise Mathematics; How Many More Franchise Broker Networks Do We Need?
- Six Ways to Improve Employee Morale Without Breaking the Bank
- Why Your Twitter Followers Aren’t Leads…Or Are They?
- Act Like a Child and Increase Your Small Business Marketing Skills
- The 7 Ages Of Your Business – From Enthusiasm To Exhaustion
Notice that two of the titles ask a provocative question and two others include a top 6 or top 7 list. Asking questions and creating lists are proven methods to drive interest in your articles. Even if all you change is your title and keep the content of your articles the same you could see significant changes in how many people find them and link to you.
Get Your Content Into Google
You can write the greatest content in the world but if Google doesn’t know about it, you won’t get traffic or links. If your website is not very popular then Google might only come every six months to see if you have anything new. You don’t want to wait six months for them to pick up your articles! The easiest way to get your content into Google is to use their AddURL tool.
It’s a free tool that Google created to help you add pages into their index. Simply go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ then put in your URL, type in the letters that appear in the box and press “Add URL” – you’re done!
If you’re adding many pages at a time then you might want to consider creating a sitemap of your content. This requires slightly more technical skill but it’s worth it if you are writing a lot of content and want Google to pick up all of your pages.
I’ll continue the Link Building Tactics series in the coming weeks and hope that in the meantime you focus you efforts on developing quality content that makes people want to read on, keep it to around 500 words, and tell Google as soon as you create the content so you can get indexed right away.
I’d be curious to know what piece of content got the most links for you?
another interesting SEO article! if you wanna be an SEO Guru you must read what Evan writes…greetings from Belize Central America.
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RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
RT @tweetmeme Link Building Tactics Series Part 2 – SEO University: It’s time for Part 2 in m.. http://bit.ly/BYIHl
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Hi Evan,
What has been your experience with link value with the addurl function. If you use the addurl function no doubt it will be indexed, but what about ranking for the keyword phrases?
For example can you rank for an article title that you normally would if google found it on your site?
Jeff
Hi Jeff – from my experience addurl won’t help you rank higher or lower – it just gets you into the index faster. You still need to do the onsite optimization and build links as you would with any other page.
At the beginning I actually also used the addurl for any page that linked to me because I wanted Google to recognize that page as soon as possible which would boost my rankings.
What a fabulous article. Very informative.
Thank you.
Harriette Blye
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