Oh we love the links and then some here at TopRank. Today, old school online marketer Larry Chase published a few more link building tips and resources in his most recent Web Digest for Marketers newsletter. I’ve added a few of my own comments:
- Widget Linking – The RSS Buttons and Social Bookmark tools that TopRank’s Thomas McMahon created serve as excellent widget linking examples. Widgets were hot back in the late nineties when Angelfire and Geocities were the rage in personal web sites. What’s old has become new again.
- Content Keyword Tagging – Using tags with social bookmarking, ala del.icio.us, can be a very effective way to organize resources on the web. Tags do not offer the same kind of structure as category based organization, but that’s what makes them so useful. Also, many of the social bookmark services such as Furl.net create a copy and crawlable links when you save a bookmark.
- Social Media Linking – Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon get most of the attention these days and can drive a signficant amount of traffic if your news hits a home run. What many marketers don’t realize is that there is often far more valuable traffic (links and conversions) from sites that mashup social news RSS feeds, or sites that mine social news for story ideas rather than from the social news sites directly.
- Mapping Link Hubs and Tag Neighborhoods – Find out who’s linking to like minded sites and your competition and you may find some great link opportunities for yourself. Hubfinder anyone?
- PDF Linking – Most SEO’s embed links in PDF files, but how many are adding meta data? Especially popular with business to business services, PDF files offer a great opportunity for visibility with buyers researching large scale purchases.
- Blog Optimization – There are no optimization suggestions per se, but Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings blog is deservedly pointed out as a good resource on blog optimization. Personally, I like to search Google for “blog optimization” and marvel at the #1 listing. Oh, that’s bad. 🙂
- Link Analytics – There are a variety of link research tools that can be used to research new link opportunities, value links, check anchor text and target .edu and .gov link sources.
- Press Release Optimization – Yeah, we know a few things about press release optimization around here! The real value is when releases get picked up by other web sites with links back to your company. Greg Jarboe and Jamie O’Donnel along with SiteLab have creating an interesting tool for optimizing releases called newsforce, which we’ve reviewed here in the past.
- Content Repurposing – Article repositories and submission sites have lost their luster in the past year due to duplicate content issues, but certain kinds of content travels better than others this way, so it can still be a useful tactic.
- Paid Inclusion – Not as much of a player these days, there are still ways to buy your way into certain channels such as the Yahoo Search Submit program.
- Content Syndication – Basically, publishing a RSS feed allows your content to travel more easily, whether it’s in a RSS reader or when it gets syndicated to another web site. In some situations, duplicate content issues might occur as with article submissions, but there’s still abundant link benefits from having a RSS feed.
- Link Insider Tools – Yahoo Site Explorer offers a handy way to detecting inbound links to a domain or web page. Google Webmaster Central also offers useful information on inbound links.
Larry includes quite a few links to various tools so be sure to view the current issue of WDFM here.
