Home
» Blogs
» Facts
» General Facts
» How To Create A Linkbuilding Strategy - Foodie SEO

How to Create A Linkbuilding Strategy - Foodie SEO

20-Jan-2012 by FoodieSEO

What is Linkbuilding?

Linkbuilding just means accumulating links from other sites. These links are known as inbound links. An effective linkbuilding strategy helps increase your visibility in search engine results. This is because having more inbound links to your site signals to search engines that your site is a trusted authority. As a result, your site will receive more traffic from search results. For a refresher on inbound links and why they’re important, check out our last Foodie SEO entry here.

There are 3 main types of links:

Editorial links

These are links to your site that other sites give of their own volition, because they want to reference your content. These are the best type of links because you don’t have to do anything for them except produce quality content!

Manually Suggested Links

These are links that you obtain manually by convincing others to link to you or paying.

Self-created, Non-editorial Links

These are links that you've created yourself, for example, posting a link to your website when you leave a comment on a blog. These type of links have little SEO value but can add up.

So how can you create a linkbuilding strategy that will get you a variety of quality links from high ranked sites?

Step 1: Determine the sites in your area with high Page Authority or Page Rank.

As discussed in our last entry about inbound links Page Rank is a score (on a scale of 0-10) assigned to a webpage by Google that reflects its importance as a trusted source for information. The higher a site’s Page Rank, the more inbound links it has. You can find out the PageRank of a page from PageRank checkers such as http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php.
Page Authority is a score out of 100 that predicts a page's ranking potential in the search engines. The higher the Page Authority, the more likely the page will rank higher in search engines. To find out a webpage’s Page Authority, you can enter in the url at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org. (This tool will be discussed more in-depth later in this entry).

Step 2: Determine how to go about getting links from them. The following table contains some specific strategies for getting links, listed in order of decreasing importance.

Editorial Links	Manually Suggested Links	Self-Created Links
Create quality content on your site that is interesting and relevant to your target. Remind readers that they can share your content as long as they provide a link back to your site. Make it easy for them to share your content by adding social media sharing buttons to that page. For example, add a 'Like' button for Facebook and 'Tweet' button for Twitter. Create “linkbait”. This is content that is shareable, interesting and designed to attract links. Again, don’t for get to add social sharing buttons. You can also promote this content yourself by posting links on social sharing sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Find an unanswered question or need in your area of expertise, and answer it. Write an article or create a resource to answer a question that no one else has answered well enough yet. Write press releases. Write a press release about something interesting on your site, whether it’s a new product, new service or how you offer solutions to a current issue. Include links to your site in the press release. You can use paid services such as PRWeb to create and release your releases. These services will help optimize and distribute your releases to other sites, giving your more links.	Pitch your site to other site owners. Keep it short and genuine. Explain why you’ve contacted them, and invite them to look at a particular page that might interest them. Invite them to link to that page. Submit sites to be listed in directories Directories are basically large lists of sites. Some require payment. You can find a list of them here. Visit the directories to find out how to submit a site. Once you submit a site, the directory will approve and publish the link. Focus on submitting to directories with high page authority and no spam listings. *Write guest posts on other sites.* Reach out to other site owners and offer your expertise through a guest post on their site. You can also offer them a chance to write on on yours. Add a link to your site in your guest post. *Give away prizes!* Host a giveaway on your site or provide prizes to other site owners in exchange for a link to your site Ask your readers to link to you with a badge on their site. Create a fun badge that is readily available on your site and ask your loyal visitors to use it. For example, one of our partners Happy Homemaker Cindy offers the code for a badge on the lower right hand side of the page. Anyone can come to her site and take the badge for their site. Pay for listings (not recommended) You can buy links from other sites. However, search engines will try to decrease the importance of such links in their search results. They are constantly searching for ways to detect paid links. As a result paid links are not a good option for creating long-term SEO value.	Share your content on Social Sharing sites. Examples include Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Leave a link to your site in your forum signatures. Post on food-related forums such as Chowhound. Make sure your posts aren’t just about selling your site - post valuable information, respond to queries, etc. Place a link to your site in your forum signatures. Leave a link to your site when you comment on other blogs. Make sure your comments are genuine and specific to the entry. Generic comments that are obviously for SEO purposes will be detected by bloggers and search engines. Leave a link to your site when you sign a guestbook on another site. Add links to your site in your user profiles on other sites or communities. Add or edit articles on Wiki sites and link to your site by including it as a reference. You can find a list of food-related wikis here. Wikis are essentially community-oriented content management systems that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is the most famous example. A note of caution about self-created links: Creating these types of links through automatic programs is considered spamming. In addition, some sites will use the rel="nofollow" attribute in their site code, which tells search engines NOT to crawl such links in comments, guestbooks, etc. As a result, such links may not actually matter for SEO purposes.

Editorial Links

Manually Suggested Links

Self-Created Links

Create quality content on your site that is interesting and relevant to your target.
Remind readers that they can share your content as long as they provide a link back to your site. Make it easy for them to share your content by adding social media sharing buttons to that page. For example, add a 'Like' button for Facebook and 'Tweet' button for Twitter.

Create “linkbait”.
This is content that is shareable, interesting and designed to attract links. Again, don’t for get to add social sharing buttons. You can also promote this content yourself by posting links on social sharing sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Find an unanswered question or need in your area of expertise, and answer it.
Write an article or create a resource to answer a question that no one else has answered well enough yet.

Write press releases.
Write a press release about something interesting on your site, whether it’s a new product, new service or how you offer solutions to a current issue. Include links to your site in the press release. You can use paid services such as PRWeb to create and release your releases. These services will help optimize and distribute your releases to other sites, giving your more links.

Pitch your site to other site owners.
Keep it short and genuine. Explain why you’ve contacted them, and invite them to look at a particular page that might interest them. Invite them to link to that page.

Submit sites to be listed in directories
Directories are basically large lists of sites. Some require payment. You can find a list of them here. Visit the directories to find out how to submit a site. Once you submit a site, the directory will approve and publish the link. Focus on submitting to directories with high page authority and no spam listings.

Write guest posts on other sites.

Reach out to other site owners and offer your expertise through a guest post on their site. You can also offer them a chance to write on on yours. Add a link to your site in your guest post.

Give away prizes!

Host a giveaway on your site or provide prizes to other site owners in exchange for a link to your site

Ask your readers to link to you with a badge on their site.
Create a fun badge that is readily available on your site and ask your loyal visitors to use it. For example, one of our partners Happy Homemaker Cindy offers the code for a badge on the lower right hand side of the page. Anyone can come to her site and take the badge for their site.

Pay for listings (not recommended)

You can buy links from other sites. However, search engines will try to decrease the importance of such links in their search results. They are constantly searching for ways to detect paid links. As a result paid links are not a good option for creating long-term SEO value.

Share your content on Social Sharing sites. Examples include Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit.

Leave a link to your site in your forum signatures.

Post on food-related forums such as Chowhound. Make sure your posts aren’t just about selling your site - post valuable information, respond to queries, etc. Place a link to your site in your forum signatures.

Leave a link to your site when you comment on other blogs.
Make sure your comments are genuine and specific to the entry. Generic comments that are obviously for SEO purposes will be detected by bloggers and search engines.

Leave a link to your site when you sign a guestbook on another site.

Add links to your site in your user profiles on other sites or communities.

Add or edit articles on Wiki sites and link to your site by including it as a reference.
You can find a list of food-related wikis here. Wikis are essentially community-oriented content management systems that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is the most famous example.

A note of caution about self-created links:
Creating these types of links through automatic programs is considered spamming.
In addition, some sites will use the rel="nofollow" attribute in their site code, which tells search engines NOT to crawl such links in comments, guestbooks, etc. As a result, such links may not actually matter for SEO purposes.

A good balance of all three types of inbound links is important. However, focus on creating high quality content that will attract editorial links and make it easier to manually suggest links to other sites.

Check your current link status

You can check the links that your site currently has, with these free link tools:

Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

To get started, create a Webmaster Tools account. Then validate your site and follow the program's instructions to upload your sitemap, which is essentially a list of pages on your site that you want crawled by search engines. (To refresh your memory on what crawling is, check out our search engine FoodieSEO entry). Then you will be able to use Bing Webmaster Tools to view the following information:

How your site is being crawled by Bing
Which keywords are driving traffic from search engine results to your site
A list of sites, with anchor text, that are linking to your site.
And more! Click the link to get started.

Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

To use this site, just click the link and enter in your site URL. You’ll see the following information:

The top 1,000 links to your site. You can filter the results to only see links that pass value. You can see the link’s anchor text, the authority of the site that is linking to you, the strength of your page, and more.
Total Links to your site: All links to this page including internal, external, followed and nofollowed.
The most-linked pages on your site
The anchor text phrases used to link to your site
Your site’s Page Authority: Predicts this page's ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics.
Your site’s Domain Authority: Predicts this domain's ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics.
Linking Root Domains: Number of unique root domains (e.g. *.example.com) containing at least one linking page to this URL.

We’ve tried to give you a basic overview of linkbuilding strategies. If you’d like to find out even more, check out this comprehensive linkbuilding guide by SEOMoz. Most of the information in this entry is from a Hubspot guide and another article by SEOMoz.

As always, thanks for reading. Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions!

Comments

Comments: 2 | Add a Comment

Buena Park WordPress Training says :

Love the comment. I've bookmarked your site in my browser to follow-up with later.

Posted on: 8 June 2012 - 12:45pm

jaylinpaul says :

hello i read your post this is really great information about this topic I have created an online site about mobile i visit the site for my seo work online marketing i am Contact this site is very cheap i also use it

Posted on: 29 January 2013 - 5:11pm