I’m admittedly not much of an avid backlink builder. However, there are both a few tactics I use when I want to see faster results and several tactics I’ve come across other people using successfully.
Using Your Client Network
Many of you may know that I work with local clients and completely manage numerous local business websites in the process. However, I often use this to my advantage to create what I refer to as an “inbred link network”. Basically, whenever I get a new client, I do two things:
- I give them a link from my company website, usually in an article if I can find one that’s relevant to their business.
- I link to my company website to their company website. Sometimes it’s a footer or sidebar link, though I’ve thrown myself on the “employees” pages in the past (with their permission, of course).
I repeat this process for each new client, though I also link the websites of my clients together.
Now, believe it or not, this actually does not violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. After all, the sites are all legitimate, high quality, and linked to in a relevant way; so don’t worry about getting penalised from this.
Link Building Outreach
Every now and then, I receive an email from someone looking to get a link from one of my sites. Most of the emails I receive are poorly-written, so I don’t bother responding. However, there’s a rare occasion where I receive an email that seems genuine. For example, rather than them asking for a backlink, they ask me what they can do to get a backlink from before listing examples of what they can do. This makes me take their trade into consideration, since they’re offering me something in return.
At this point, they’ll have my curiosity, so I’ll go and check out the site they want me to link to. If it’s a website with low-quality content, then I won’t respond. But then if it’s a decent looking site with good content, I’ll have no problem linking to their site without them providing me with anything in return.
Using Your Own Sites
This is a watered-down version of the first link building method for those of you who don’t have clients. However, it requires you to have a site with at least some ranking power. Pretty much all you have to do is add a link to your high-ranking site with the keyword you’re targeting to one of your low-ranking sites. The results will vary, although in the case of one of my latest clients who was stuck on pages 4-5 for most of their keywords, this boosted them up to pages 1-3.
Social Media
I’m absolutely terrible when it comes to social media… Anything! Although, I’ve seen some success when it comes to promoting content using social media marketing, more specifically on Twitter.
All I really do is use Twitter and Facebook to share the URL and add a few relevant hashtags. Yes, that’s it. There’s probably a much better way of doing this, so if you understand social media well, then by all means use your method.
