SEO Linkbuilding – How to Get Links by Writing Articles

Links are the driving force behind gaining the coveted #1 positions for high search volume keywords. Today I am going to explain 3 things as they relate to building links by writing informative articles on your company blog or website. I will go through the following main three points:

1. Why you need links
2. What links are good links
3. HOW to get links by writing articles

First off, lets go over why you need links in the first place. As you may or may not already know, building a steady supply of links from related, high profile websites to your site is the single most important factor in search engine optimization today. By discovering links to your site from high quality, highly relevant websites major search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) are able to see that your site is credible and relevant for industry related keywords. According to Google, their “search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.” — in this way, the web is somewhat of a democracy, allowing links to serve as votes of confidence for your site. The only difference in Google’s democracy and ours here in the USA is that Google gives a bigger vote to more “credible” sources. So in short, you need links from individuals/organizations in your industry who are credible and highly regarded by search engines because these votes are the kind that count with Google and other major search engines today.

Alright, so you know why you need links and I have briefly touched on what kind of links are good links, but what exactly are we looking for in a good link? A good link will be all of the following:

• From a domain with high Google PageRank or PR (individual page PR is important, but if the domain has a high page rank you are just as well off, as the individual page will gain PageRank over time. Read more about PageRank.
• From a domain or page that is relevant to your industry (For example, LUCID Public Relations is relevant to a number of related industries such as marketing, advertising and search engine optimization–links from quality sites in any of these industries would be great for us).
• Utilizes your keywords in the anchor text of the link (for example a good link for LUCID would look like this: LUCID Public Relations)
• Is a DoFollow link (one that passes a vote of confidence to your site, as opposed to a NoFollow link which is used for advertisements or sites that a webmaster wants to link to, but not endorse in any way). Read more about NoFollow/DoFollow at Google.

Now that you know why you need links and what kind of links are good we can get into the most important part of this article: how to get great links by writing articles on your site!

If you don’t already have a blog set up on your site, now may be the time to get one set up– there are many ways to get articles on your site, but that will have to be discussed at another time (or with your web developer). If you already have a blog CMS (Content Management System) set up, or know how to create articles on your website, you are ready to get started. There are several elements that you want to include in your articles in order to attract the most useful links.

• Make the article topic relevant to your industry. At LUCID Public Relations (we are an SEO and Public Relations firm) we write only about public relations, SEO and internet marketing– this attracts links from websites that are related to ours.
• Include keywords in the title (without making it look “spammy” or overstuffed with keywords). Often times people will link to articles using only the title of the article as anchor text, so using your keywords in the article title will increase the likelihood that those keywords will be included in your anchor text.
• Provide useful, intelligent information for your readers. This one may seem like a no-brainer, but believe it or not, many webmasters think that pushing out poorly written articles on a mass-scale is the solution gaining important in the search results. Not only does this practice damage your brand by making you look like a spammer, it doesn’t work nearly as well as writing thoughtful and original content.

Think about the process of distribution that an article goes through once it is published on your site–how are you getting the word out? I will spare you the “if a tree falls in the forest” analogy, but this is really important: if you write amazing content and no one ever sees it you are guaranteed to not get any links, so find a way to distribute your work. You may want to try these avenues:

• Social Networking: Blast new articles out to all of your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Often times articles on mediums like these can spread like wildfire from one profile to the next, causing an article to go “viral”.
• Social Bookmarking: Submit your articles to sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.Icio.us, Fark, Slashdot, Propeller, Etc. — often times, sites like these can bring in 20,000-30,000 hits in a day (don’t believe me? Check out the Digg Effect/Slashdot Effect on Wikipedia).
• Ping Ping Ping!!: Ping the search engines when you have new articles written. Our favorite service for this is called Ping-o-matic– this one-stop pinging machine will tell a number of sources that you have recently updated an article on your site and is great at driving in search engine traffic. Furthermore, after you submit your site using Ping-o-matic, it may start showing up in Google’s blog feed (which means your articles will be instantly indexed, rather than having to wait days at a time).

Please feel free to contact us at LUCID Public Relations or comment below if you have questions or comments and we’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible (if you want a reply, emailing or calling us is the best way to get one).