Getting Links to Your Website – A Great Way to Gain Google’s Trust
April 19th, 2009 Posted in PR, SEOHigh-quality links are absolutely necessary to boost your page rank and organic search results. And these links are easily available without emailing, wasting valuable paper (by paper, I mean money) or even paying attention to search engines. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this and it’s all about giving.
“You can get links without emailing or wasting paper (money).”
Here’s how you make it happen:
Provide a useful, one-time service
Huh?! A useful, one-time service? Get your mind out of the gutter and back to SEO.
Surprisingly enough, providing a useful, one-time service doesn’t take much effort. Embrace this concept, because almost everything in SEO takes effort. Here are some examples:
- Check out stclaire.com. You have to sign up for a free account, but the service is cool; it provides an online spot to create ANSI-compliant warning signs. Then, you get PDF files ready to print. It’s a fun (and free) place for making gag signs whether they’re for the office or your friend’s windshield. I made this in a few minutes:
“Create ANSI-compliant warning signs in minutes…”
- Is that too much work? The next example is even simpler. People loathe spam mail, right? When we leave our email addresses out there, it opens up the flood gates for more spam. Here’s a site that lets you make a graphical badge instead. That url is for Gmail, but there are urls for Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL.
- Is that too much trouble? Alright…you can also encode email addresses using JavaScript or character entities. For example, this de-spammer site can turn a normal email address like thatswhat@shesaid.com into something like this:
“Trick email harvesters with JavaScript encoding.”
You think that email harvesters are going to mess with that bad boy? No way.
Provide an ongoing service
If you can’t provide a one-time useful service, provide a service that people will access on a continual basis. Make it useful and make it last.
Check out Google Reader, for example. This service rocks, because it combines the sites that you read on a daily basis into one place. No need to bounce from site to site (unless you enjoy that sort of thing) because you can consolidate all of your blog updates onto one site.
The next step is to create an account in Google Reader, and add the Branding Blog to your list (obviously).
“Become a pool of knowledge and education others…”
Provide valuable information
Becoming a pool of knowledge is a big deal because you are responsible for educating others. My grandpa, for example, is a pool of knowledge. Whenever I need advice, I go to him because I trust his credibility and wealth of knowledge.
Do this for your company or client: become the wise, go-to person. What’s the perk to this status? If you are a source of info, you build trust. By building trust first and trying to sell your service/product provider second, people will come to you when it’s time to make a purchase.
- You can do this by creating a personal or company blog. Blogs are a great way to get link love or just to get your word out.
- If blogs sound scary, start out with newsletters. Or studies. Or surveys. Just start with something.
Overall, your goal should be to provide valuable information that keeps them coming back for more. Be the first. Not an easy task, but well worth it. You have to come up with creative ideas that catch Google’s attention. If you have a creative opportunity, run with it. Worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t work.
Best case scenario? Take a look at SEO Book.com, a genius creation by Aaron Wall.
Inbound link building involves being interactive on many different levels. The more levels you participate in, the better your chances for more inbound links, leading to a higher PR. Be active, be patient, and engage, engage, engage.
| Alyssa DiLoreto
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