This is not the first big list of link building technique posts, there’s a couple of others here, here and here. My intention here was really to create a list which was just link building tactics, no recommendations like ‘use spell check’ and ‘get your site to validate’- although these are fair points they can’t really be called tactics. I’ve dug into my old bookmarks to come up with some of the best techniques around as well as some which many will consider outdated. I’m sure there’s plenty more to be found.
I would guess most SEO’s are probably only regularly using a small fraction of the link building techniques on this list, it’s easy to get into a routine of just using the means you find the easiest so hopefully this big list might encourage some out of box type thinking in your link building.
The list is certainly not exhaustive and some of these techniques I definitely steer clear of these days although I would assume they still work. Please feel free to add anything I’ve overlooked in the comments with links if possible. Enjoy!
- Buy high quality listings on Yahoo, BOTW, business.com etc
- Get a free DMOZ listing either by submitting or better yet, become an editor
- Get an AboutUs spotlight written for your business
- Find a list of all the niche directories in your industry and submit to them
- Look for local business directories in your area and submit to them
- Hire a company to build 1200 low quality directory links (might still give you a boost in uncompetitive industries)
- Write quality articles and publish top article directories like Ezine, Buzzle, GoArticles, & Article Dashboard
- Write articles for work.com
- Write articles for Infobarrel
- Hire a company to write lots of 400 word articles and submit to syndication services link article marketer or iSnare with about the author backlinks
- If you’ve got news worthy content run paid press releases through sites like PRWeb
- Syndicate press releases to free PR sites
- Create an RSS feed if you haven’t already got one for your company news. Submit it to RSS syndication sites like Feedbomb
- Buy quality links from webmasters and bloggers by contacting them directly and offering cash
- Buy links through a link broker
- Buy .edu links
- Use a link network like TNX to buy a range of cheap low quality links
- Buy inlinks
- Buy links from local journalists
- Use paid review services like sponsored reviewed, reviewme or pay per post
- Buy cheap dofollow banners directly from small publishers, forum moderators and local businesses
- Pay forum moderators or regular contributors to add your link to their signiture
- Buy blogroll links
- Create a links page, look for sites with their own links pages and exchange links (still works well for local businesses)
- Exchange in-content links (ideally on new pages as they’re added)
- Create microsites or blogs on standalone domains and use these sites to trade off links to your main domain
- Use a link exchange network like Linkvault or co-op to exchange links
- Create pages/ profiles on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace (nofollow)
- Setup LinkedIn profiles (nofollow)
- Create Squidoo lenses
- Create hubpages
- Answer relevant questions on Yahoo answers with backlinks (nofollow)
- Answer relevant questions on LinkedIn answers with backlinks
- Submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (use voting rings to vote your content up in these sites)
- Bookmark your site on social bookmarking sites like delicious
- Register your brand name on hundreds of social media sites with KnowEm – some will include links in your profile
- Setup a blog within your main domain and submit it to blog directories like BOTW blog directory
- Link out generously to other blogs to get on the radar and gain trackback links
- Write guest posts on similar blogs
- Comment on loads of other blogs
- Buy blog comments
- Swap blogroll links with other bloggers
- Setup blogs on Blogspot, Wordpress.com or typepad.com, post a couple of articles with backlinks to your main site
- Ask for links by analyzing your competitors backlinks and contacting their webmasters seeing if they’ll link to you
- Ask for links from universities, local government or trade bodies
- Identify content gaps on other sites or blogs, produce relevant content on your site and tell the webmaster about it
- Ask to write articles/ sections for other sites for free with links in the text
- Give great testimonials to your suppliers and make sure they add a link under your name
- Get speaking gigs and stands at conferences/ trade shows
- Give quotes to journalists for their stories
- Contribute to industry forums using backlinks in your threads where relevant
- Pay someone to spam write forum posts for you
- Start your own forum on your domain- good forum posts attract natural links
- Create informative or funny video’s on your site and make them embeddable with text links in a <noscript> tag- contact bloggers or sites who might like your vid’s and get them to embed them.
- Submit your videos to video sites like YouTube and include links in the description (nofollow)
- Give away free stock imagery with an attribution licence
- Use an image hotlinking script
- Write funny, useful or controversial blog posts on your site designed to do well on social voting sites like Digg
- Run some industry research like a salary survey and publish the results on your site
- Create a ‘fake bait’ piece
- Create a free tool or application (think about iPhone apps for a link frenzy) and host it on your site for downloads
- Create a big list of free resources or top posts on a particular niche with lots of links out, just like this post!
- Give stuff away- send free t-shirts or merchandise to bloggers in your niche or offer free subscriptions and ask them to review you
- Do a promotion on twitter. Anything even vaguely clever will attract links from the new media press at the moment
- Conduct an interview with prominent bloggers/ industry figures. At the very least you should get a link off the interviewee.
- Setup an industry news feed
- Write anything controversial/ defamatory
- Create a blog for wordpress, blogger, typepad with a footer link back to your site
- Think about creating templates for other open source CMS’s like Joomla or Drupal which have less competition in the template market
- Create free Joomla components or plugins and get a link off the Joomla extensions directory (also embed links in the component if possible)
- Create a free image hosting or fileshare system on your site. 301 redirect download links which haven’t been used for 1 month back to your homepage or other sites
- Create a free javascript hit counter with an embedded backlink (there’s plenty of these out there already so you’ll need to promote the hit counter with Adwords)
- Sponsor a university radio station
- Sponsor a university sports team
- Donate to charities and get links from their donor pages
- Sponsor a forum with a dofollow banner link
- Sponsor a well known podcast, get links off their site and from their listeners blogs
- Create donar pages on sites like Kiva.org
- Sponsor an industry conference
- Advertise on local radio. Ad sales guys will usually agree to give you a website link included in the ad package
- Advertise on blogs which have ‘thanks to our sponsors pages‘
- Place job ads on university or industry job boards with a backlink to your application form. Once the application deadline passes 301 the app form page to your homepage
- Create an SEO friendly affiliate program
- 301 your linked to error 404 pages back to your homepage
- 301 redirect cannibalized/ duplicate pages to your main page
- Buy up expiring domains with PageRank, use the way back machine to retrieve their old content and host the old site with some backlinks to your sites
- Buy up expiring domains with PageRank and 301 them straight to your main site
- Nepotistic links- make use of other sites you own, parent or child companies
- Get links from any trade associations or industry memberships you pay for
- Write into your contracts with suppliers that they have to link to you from their site in order to retain your business
- If your sites pretty submit it to CSS galleries
- Create online tests and give participants badges to put on their sites of your community
- Create membership badges your sites members can paste onto their sites to show they’re part of your community
- Join local networking groups and get a link off their site- use the group to network with other local businesses and negotiate more links
- Create autoposting scraper sites and stuff them with backlinks to your main site
- Search for mentions of your brand name which don’t include a link.
- Use Google alerts to pick up on new mentions of your brand name quickly, if those mentions don’t have a link, ask for one quick
- Run your own industry conference/ blogger meetup
- Add your links to wikipedia pages or create your own page for your company (nofollow)
- Add internal links to keywords throughout your site. If you use wordpress this plugin will help or this one for Joomla
- One for luck- win industry awards
Directories
The emphasis has to be on quality over quantity with directories. A few still offer PageRank/ trust passing links. Most free directories don’t seem to although in uncompetitive niches you might still be able to use free directory submission on a large scale with manipulated anchor text to target your keywords. Local directories still work pretty well also.
Articles
There’s only a small number of article directories worth submitting to now but these are well worth using still as their links pass some value and you can easily manipulate anchor text and build deep links.
Online Press releases
Press releases were all the rage a few years ago. The usefulness of online press release sites for juice passing links is fairly low (although again you can deep link and control anchor text). If your story is good enough getting picked up on Google news through these sites may be one road to get into the mainstream media.
RSS
RSS scraping can occasionally give you new backlinks, although the sites which your feeds are published on are usually low quality
Buy links
Still fairly essential in competitive markets, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to buy links. Basically the bigger the footprint the bigger the risk so tread with caution.
2-way link exchange (aka recipricol linking)
You link to me, I’ll link back. Maybe it shouldn’t work still but it does seem to. It makes sense that a significant portion of your entire link profile will be reciprocal, but don’t go overboard and only link out to quality, relevant sites.
3-way links
Slightly dubious tactic. Only use in moderation and in conjunction with other 1-way link building techniques, else its going to look like you’re part of a link network
Social media
There’s plenty of new ’social media’ type sites popping up all the time. Generally the links passed by these sites have little value in their own right but they can help to get your content in front of the right audience which can lead to organic links. Use in conjunction with link bait.
Blogging
Blogs are hot-beds of link activity. If you have a blog and are prepared to link out, great things can happen!
Request links
You don’t ask you don’t get. Still one of the most cost effective ways of building quality links
Content for links
As webmasters start to understand the value of their content more offering some sort of content exchange adds an extra punch to the classic link exchange
Forums
Although forum links are going to be devalued by search engines (because they’re so easy to get) having a number of links from decent forums on relevant threads will give a small boost and can drive traffic.
Images/ Video
Done right multimedia can drive tonnes of links, but there’s often more skill/ money involved in the implementation which many SEO teams may be lacking.
Link Bait
Link bait as a term is a bit of a fad, but the concept of creating quality, engaging content and promoting it to get links is a sound one.
Templates & software
Sponsorship & donations
These may be seen by some as paid links by the backdoor but sponsorship is a great way to get links on quality sites who would not otherwise link out.
Advertising
Miscellaneous
There are literally hundreds more link building tactics you could use. Here I’ve jotted down a few which sprung to mind to fill up the 100, add your own in the comments…
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Great list. good to see some old favourites mixed up with some stuff I’ve never even thought about before. Will come back to it when I need inspiration!