With all the buzz about Google placing value on one-way inbound links to websites, everyone is scrambling to build links in any way they can- sometimes to the detriment of their site, the infamous “black-hat SEO” effect.

The key to getting good one-way links is to start with good quality content on your site. If you read on the SEO forums, Google values content and appropriate links to that content above all. So how can you obtain a one-way inbound link that takes that part of Google’s formula into consideration? First you must write (or have somebody write) good content for your website, whether it be about widgets or website optimization. Once you have that content, it becomes much easier to build links to it.

One very important caveat: the trick to making this work is to use these link techniques in ways that make sense in a non-spammy way. For instance, if you post a comment to Joe Blow’s Bowling Blog that says, “Check out my Gambling Site!” your comment, with its accompanying link, will be taken down quickly and do you much more harm than good.

1. Find forums or messageboards which are about a similar subject as your content, and post to the forums. Make sure these are forums which allow links within the body of the post. Use quotes from your content, and use those quotes to link back to the location of your content. Do this in a way that makes sense and that actually meets a need or answers a question for the forum you are posting in, for instance, if the post is about using size 7 blue widgets for some purpose, you might post about how you’ve successfully used size 9 red widgets for a similar purpose and link to the area of your content about it. Relevancy is the key.
2. Find blogs that are of similar subject as your content, and comment on the posts closest in subject to your content. Use the url of your content as the url for your registration to post comments on that blog, which will create a link. If the blog comment allows links, then you may also create a link providing you can do so in a relevant way.
3. If, like this site, you use blogging software to publish, you can use your blog content to “track back” to another blog’s article which offers similar content, content that is complementary to yours, or content that backs up a point you’ve made in your content. This creates an “instant link” to your site from that other blog you’ve tracked back to. Another way to achieve a similar effect is to write a trackback blog post which points out similarities or differences in viewpoint between the trackedback post and your own content, and include a link to your own content from your blogpost. If you do this respectfully and you’re careful to back up your points if your viewpoint differs, this can be a very powerful tool.
4. Post your content in article form to one or more “free reprint articles” sites, with the condition that your articles must have a linkback to your site in the form of an “about the author” box at the bottom, which you write yourself and which you use to include good link text and the link back to your content. Worst case the article will be published on the “free reprint articles” site, and best case it may be picked up for use by other sites and ezines for reprint, creating new links to your content in each instance.
5. Send a web press release announcing new content on your site with a link to it, what it’s about, and why it’s important to your potential readers. Make sure to include, as with the article, an “about the author” box with information and another linkback to your content.

Creatively using the tools the web gives us to create our own mini-web of similar content places our subject matter in a context that makes sense for the Google spider, and allows more effective indexing of our site’s contents, which eventually leads to better SE rankings, better traffic, and a more effective website.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 1:36 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.