Looking for a few creative Link Building strategies?
For some marketers, link building is a fairly mechanical exercise. Third party websites are targeted without any thought for their value, bulk emails are sent in search of external links, and aggressive blog commenting campaigns eat up time and produce relatively minimal results. It is a strategy that is built on numbers, and it is one that tends to fail when placed alongside creative link building.
While SEO is very much a mathematical discipline, it is not something that can be perfected through link quantity in place of quality. Websites with thousands of inbound links often fail to outrank their competitors with hundreds of links, particularly when a quantity-based approach is used. If your eye is on the top spot, use these creative link building strategies to beat link-heavy competitors.
1) Find the ‘hardest’ links, and work for them.
Most marketers ignore the ‘hard to find’ links – exclusive recommendations from top blogs, posts on top websites, and inclusions in the top directories. It is a classic example of numbers failing to reveal real opportunities, and it can make things easier for dedicated webmasters. When you see a link that most would think of as impossibly difficult to acquire, put in the extra time and work to secure it.
2) Think outside of your niche, but inside your industry.
Google does not just love links, it loves relevant links. When you are searching for link opportunities, it can pay to look at large websites that provide general coverage of your industry. A niche-specific website may not wish to give up its link juice, while a more general aggregator website (quite often a more powerful link resource) may be happy to provide an outbound link to your website.
3) PageRank is not everything. Think about anchor text.
There is more to high rankings than Google’s frequently misunderstood PageRank value. When you have the choice between a minimally higher PageRank placement and a more relevant link placed on a website of lesser value, it could be worth picking the latter. Anchor text counts for more than most SEOs acknowledge, and it is sometimes worth passing over PageRank in order to get it.
4) Missed opportunity? Do not take it too seriously.
There are millions of inbound link opportunities out there for each website, regardless of the scale of its particular niche. If you miss out on a great inbound linking opportunity, don’t sweat it. With billions of indexed pages and millions of individual websites out there, it is very unlikely that your ‘miracle’ link opportunity is all that unique. Try again, but do not be phased by a missed chance.