21 replies to this topic

[Trilitech]

I think I've reached the point to where I've run out of link building ideas for my credit card site. I skimmed the articles in the sticky thread and didn't see anything new. Here's what I've tried so far, can any one offer some suggestions? The ones below have worked out somewhat ok (Marketleap 758, PR4) but obviosly I'd like more. Yes I am keyword optimizing all these links and will continue to use the techniques below but they're getting less efficient every day.

Published Free Reprintble Articles
By far the best results here. I've submitted them to several article directories and have picked up the majority of my backlinks from here. I continue to release new ones bi-weekly

Provided RSS Feed
Have an rss feed for all the articles and ping 50 RSS agregates with each new release.

Submitted to Directories
Hired someone to do this and have picked up about 50 links this way, but haven't seen any traffic from them and I don't the the SE's are picking up the majority of them.

Link Trading
Hasn't worked out too well. About 1 in 10 agree to trade links and is very time consuming.

Press Releases
Have released three press releases through PRWeb at varying levels. They show 30,000 to 100,000 views per release but that didn't translate into much traffic. I think I only picked up one backlink each from this because all the consumers link to the article on PRWeb which links to me.

Free Tools
Created a Javascript credit card payoff calculator and submitted it to all the scripting sites. Average about 5 visitors a day from this and pick up a new backlink everytime someone ads it to their site. I'd do more tools, but can't think of any others related to my site.

Yahoo Directory
Haven't payed for this because my category has three pages of results already. Don't think it would help much.

Other Paid Directories
I've paid for these with other sites, but it didn't really work out so I didn't do so with this one.

Open Directory
Submitted about 2 months ago and sent in the 30 day status check. I'll check every six months for the next 6-8 years until I get listed.

Forum Signatures
Use them on sites that allow it.

Blog Spam
I've refrained from this one.. You're welcome...

Cross Linking from other sites
Have about 45 of my own sites linking to this one (most are very low traffic/links/pr).

That's all I can remember doing. Any ideas?

[Shane]

Man, Trilitech, that's a fantastic, tight summary of ways to build links. I'm bookmarking this thread.

I assume you're looking for more links because you want to improve your rankings. Have you worked as hard at on-page factors as you have with link building? There's a very interesting discussion going on over at the Search Engine Watch forums about whether links matter at all. (Of course they do, but there are some very good points being made nonetheless.)

If it's higher rankings you're looking for, and you haven't hit on-page as hard as link building, hang around for 18 more posts and then submit your site for a review in this forum.

[Bernard]

Some ideas:

• Join organizations (whether non-profit or otherwise) that list member's web sites
• Buy advertising (text links)
• Research who is linking to your competition

[Tawnya]

Great list! here are a few other things I've done in the past...

Write a witty testimonial for a product/service you love. Email to the company with a link to your webpage and 9 times out of 10 the webmaster will use it on their testimonial page with a backlink to your website. ie)

I love MollyMop's Maid Services for my company and personal home cleaning. Housework can't kill me but why take a chance?
Tawnya Sutherland
http://www.vanetworking.com

Or maybe set up an award program on your website. Have a form on your website that people can submit their website URL to for "Cool VA Website of the Week" or whatever award you want to give. Choose a winner each week, send them the graphic award to be put on their website which links to your website. Everyone loves to win something and be put in the limelight and most webmasters will proudly link back to your website if they have received some type of award to entice them to do so.

Give away freebies or offer a download area of free things that others can use. People will often link to websites like this just to offer their own customers free stuff.

[Haystack]

About about adding a "Link to Us" note on your site?

[meta]

Make donations to organizations who link to donors on their web site. You can play around with this - say you donate something or partner with a charity, school, etc. in support of a fundraising event. You take pictures or do a writeup about the event, put the pictures or writeup on your website, then they have a reason to link to your page which features them. Some organizations, such as a public school, may have limitations on linking to a commercial site, but most private charities have plenty of leeway on this. It's common for donors to look for some sort of publicity around contributions, so if you are approached, it is fine to discuss this with fundraisers.

[Trilitech]

Wow, thanks for all the responses. Glad I could provide some usefull info to others while asking for some for myself. A few replies.

On Site Content
Shane - yes I have put quite a bit of work into optimizing my site content as well. I have my home page to what I think is the perfect criteria, but I'm still really new to this. The rest of the pages are descently optimized, but I haven't put as much work into them. Looking forward to getting some external verification. I've asked on other sites but just go "looks good" type of responses.

Join Organizations that allow site linking
I haven't really found any that let you specify your link text, it just shows up as a link to my site with http://www.mysite.com as the link text. My understanding is this doesn't help at all for SEO.

Buy Advertising
I assume you're referring to PPC. This is just two expensive for my terms (credit card related) to be profitable, and wouldn't really help my natural search rankings. If you meant pay for inclusing sites, I don't know of any sites that are worth it. I'm opent to suggestions though

Research who is linking to your competition
I have done this and that is the list I used for my link trading solicitations.

Write Testimonials
I had seen this one before, but it's the same problem with them not allowing to specify your link keywords, just http://www.mydomain.com

Award Program
Good idea, but my credit card related site wouldn't be well suited for this.

Freebies
Someone on another forum suggested this and I think I will do it. I could give away $100 prepaid credit card and get links from several free directories and probably get a high numer of signups for a newletter. The only problem is these links go away when the offer expires. Probably still worth it though.

Link to Us Note
I have a link directory page for similar sites which I have an option to submit your site to for a link exchange. Have picked up 4-5 links with it so far in the past 4 weeks.

Make donations
This is a great idea and I know someone who paid $50 to support an open source project and picked up a perminant on topic PR6 link from it. I have tried to find similar ones related to my site, but haven't found any yet.

Affiliate Program
I thought I'd throw this one in. I haven't forgot about it, I'm just not in a position to offer one just yet.

Keep them coming, these are great ideas and is turning out to be a pretty extensive list. It's not that the items already listed do not work, but once you pick up the easy links from each one they start to get much less efficient.

[Bernard]

Buy Advertising
I assume you're referring to PPC.  ...

No. I meant text links. Ie. contact sites in the SERPs that you are targeting and see if they are willing to publish links to your site as advertising (instead of asking for a free link or a reciprocal link exchange). Your best bet will be sites that already display some form of advertising.

Also, every link helps with establishing authority for your site. Having custom anchor text is nice (for relevancy), but I wouldn't bypass an opportunity for a good link just because I couldn't control the format (anchor text).

[discountdomains]

I think you are already doing the right things, it took me 2 years of link building/ directory submitting to get into the top few pages for my Domains business.

Just keep plugging away is the best advice.

Clare

[torka]

I haven't really found any that let you specify your link text, it just shows up as a link to my site with http://www.mysite.com as the link text.  My understanding is this doesn't help at all for SEO.

It may not help as much but I wouldn't say it's useless for SEO. An inbound link from a relevant site is going to help even if it does just have your URL or organizational name as the anchor text.

What it won't do is give you a special boost for a specifically-chosen key phrase, but it will provide a general boost to the linked page across the boards.

It's better to have an inbound link with less-than-ideal anchor text than to have no inbound link at all, MHO.

--Torka

[fzx5v0]

I have found that getting your link campaign started is the hard thing but once you get some google pr and your site has good informational copy then people will aproch you to swap links with

by the way way do you not have a sig for your post with a link to your site?

[Jill]

Sigs here don't help in the link building arena.

[randfish]

Jill,

I'd have to disagree - they don't help "directly", but by having some people click-through (I know I do) to your content, you may get some links from bloggers, industry-insiders, etc. who lurk and post on these forums. I know my sig site gets lots of links from posting it on these forums (although it is highly on-topic, so that probably helps too).

[Jill]

Well of course Rand! I just meant that the search engines don't see them.

They certainly help in other ways, which is why we have them!

[nuttakorn]

If we got the link from .edu, .gov , Google will give us more value of link due to getting the link from authority resource right. Do you have any idea to get the link from that arena?