The following link building tutorial will help you attract incoming links by developing your content and getting people interested in your site. There are no magic techniques, but if you follow these few steps, you can start attracting several new high-quality links every day.
Determine Your Incoming Keywords
Almost any link to your site will help it improve its overall rank. (The exception is links from spam sites.) But unless you serve a very broad audience, you really want to improve your site’s rank within your niche. For that you need targeted links.
Determine what keywords people search for in your niche. For example, if your niche is puppy dog food, determine what people search for when looking for puppy dog food. Extract from that information a short keyword you want associated with your site. That’s the keyword you want other people to use in their links to your site.
Build Your Content Base
I’ve known several Web entrepreneurs who went about link building backwards—they started link building before they really had a website. Convincing people to link to a almost non-existent website is hard; convincing people to link to a great website is easy.
So make a great website.
I suggest that before you use the rest of this link building tutorial, you ensure that you have at least 10,000 words of quality content. Anything less than that makes both people and search engines think your site could be a scam.
Now 10,000 words may sound like a lot, but if you’re passionate about your subject, you should be able to write 10,000 words in less than a weekend. And, when you’re done, you’ll have plenty of content to which other people can link.
Get Your Audience Working For You
Several link building techniques I’ll discuss later in this link building tutorial require you to actively go out and seek links. But the best link building technique is to get your audience working for you by linking to your site.
The number one way to get your audience working for you is to make them excited. You can do that in a number of ways:
• Great content: if you help them do something valuable, you audience will rave about you—and when they rave about you, they’ll link back to your site.
• Personal contact: if you develop a personal relationship with your audience through email, your comments, or social media, your audience will treat you as a friend and link back to you as often as possible.
• Great deals: if you offer your audience a great deal on something, they’ll share it with their friends by linking to your site. If you see a great offer on a site, link to it, or consider my favorite technique: giving away prizes as part of a contest.
Establish Relationships
But don’t just make your audience happy—also make happy the other people in your niche. One great way to do this is by establishing link partners.
Link partners aren’t those old link exchanges which were popular 10 years ago when Google was just starting to get big. Link partners are people who work with you to promote both your brand and theirs.
For example, if you’re in the puppy dog food niche, you can partner with a company that sells puppy dog toys. You each agree to link to the other’s site in a blog post once a month. (Make sure you make the paragraph the link appears in relevant to the other company.) Those cross links, which will look 100% organic to Google, will help both of your sites grow.
Advanced Link Building Tutorial
Before I finish this link building tutorial, let’s discuss three advanced link building techniques around the guest post technique:
1. Repeating guest posts: one of the most basic link building techniques is offering to post on someone else’s blog. If they accept your post, they also link back to your blog. But if they like your post, why not make it a regular thing? After your post runs on their site, offer to automatically write and send them a post every two months, or at whatever frequency works for you. Every time they run one of your new posts, you’ll get a new link—and their audience will be increasingly exposed to your company.
2. Prepare the ground for guest posting: the best links for your site come from sites with a higher page ranking than your site. But these higher-ranked sites are probably inundated with offers for guest posts, so how do you make your offer stand out? That’s easy: establish a relationship by frequently posting comments on their blogs. Make sure your comments are insightful and nice.
3. List your guest posts: after you’ve guest posted on several sites, create a page on your site listing all of your guest posts. Then link to this page whenever you offer to guest post for another site. When that site’s editor sees all the sites you’ve posted on before, he or she will know that you’re easy to work with and that you produce great quality work—and producing great quality work is the key to success according to this link building tutorial.