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Forum & Community Links

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:29 PM

SECTION XIV

Web forums and groups are the modern incarnation of the old bulletin board and Usenet systems. If there is a topic, hobby, interest or niche you can think of; there’s a forum (or 5,276) on the subject. Forums for your niche are great places to build your reputation and image as well as get links. They’re also a prime resource for finding content in the form of questions and topics to answer or discuss on your own site.

Some forums will allow you to include a link in your profile or your signature, but these are often ‘nofollowed’ or use a redirect (meaning the engines won’t count the links). Even if you’re not allowed to include links, it’s often worthwhile to mention URLs without hyperlinking them. Even if you don’t get credit for the link, people who like what you have to say may visit and link to you on their own.

This networking aspect of forum communities can be very powerful. As you’ve likely noticed, many effective link building strategies require you to develop and make use of relationships. Forums are where you can build those relationships. As such, you should be true to yourself but always be aware of your brand. In fact, its can be a good idea to use your URL or brand name as your profile name.

Remember, don’t be a shill. You’re trying to build relationships and visibility here. People will be more interested in what you say and do if you’re likeable or at least interesting, preferably both (although controversy can have its own advantages). Don’t be the Amway salesman that people avoid because he’s always trying to push his product on you. Many forums will immediately ban folks who shill for their sites or services.

General Web Forums:

There are thousands of web forums out there. The majority fall into a wide variety of niches that range from semi-broad to, “really, someone’s into that?” Some of the biggest forums, however, are general topic groups with enormous user bases. There are, without question, many areas on each of these where you will find relevant space to participate.

Some of the biggest general forums are:
Boards in the Technology section of Offtopic:

Specific Topic Forums:

Find a few or a few dozen forums in your niche and poke around. One nice thing about topical forums is that you know the readership is interested in your topic and therefore more likely to check out your site. There are far too many to list here, but you can always do a search for forums in your arena (use a search like “Indian Recipes” + forum at Google) or look at the Big-Boards forum directory.

Mega Forums:

There are some sites that are so big and so diverse that they have their own gravitational pull. With millions of users and countless thousands of posts every day, these are the conversation hubs of the internet.
  • Google Groups (formerly Usenet) which has tens of thousands of different groups representing millions of users. There is almost no topic you cannot find on Google Groups. If there is, go ahead and start a new forum on here for it.
  • Craigslist Forums offer extremely active running commentary in 54 forums on each of their sites for every major city in the US (and many around the world). CL forums are extremely conversational and it’s easy to get involved and get to know other users. A great bonus is they’re almost all local, allowing for the possibility of in-person business or social networking as well. This is very good for location-specific businesses such as brick-and-mortar retail or service firms in a particular region.
  • Yahoo! Answers isn’t a forum per se, but you can get on there and market yourself as an expert and a valuable resource in your areas of focus. With over 65 million user-generated answers to over 7 million user-submitted questions, Yahoo! Answers is definitely a good place to strut your stuff and build an image as an authority in your field. Bonus: great answers to interesting questions can gain featured status and/or get reposted by users, which translates into links.
A new question at Yahoo! Answers:

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Article Writing & Submission

Posted by Lord Ian at 11:28 PM

SECTION XIII

There are dozens of sites that exist solely or primarily to host the content of others and many give links back to their content providers. The biggest and most popular sites will accept material on a wide range of subjects and often have a solid reader base.

While this may seem like an easy way to get links, many of these sites get flooded with spam, so be sure to only submit quality, relevant content and check out each site to make sure it’s of a tone and quality appropriate to your brand and your image.

Some of the better sites to submit to include:
The sites listed here tend to be rather reputable and pass good “link juice” to the writers of published articles. They are more selective than many free-for-all directories, but their links are also more valuable.

If you want quick and dirty links from anything-goes sites, Ebizstartups has a huge list of hundreds more article submission sites along with a free tool that allows you to automatically submit an article to a few hundred different sites simultaneously. While very easy, we don’t particularly recommend using these kinds of services as the links (when spiderable) tend to be very low quality.

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Directory Submissions

Posted by Lord Ian at 8:05 PM

Section XII
Inclusion Strategies
Submit Yourself Here
Topic/Industry Specific Directories

Directories are handy because anybody worthy can get into them. Directories are also only marginally useful because anybody can get into them. Since you are somebody, you may as well get yourself in as many directories as you can. They not only provide links (some valuable, some less so) but they increase your online presence.

Inclusion Strategies:

First, be upfront about the type of content you offer. Give an honest, thorough, compelling description of your site: make people want to check you out, but be able to deliver on their expectations. To use the phonebook analogy again, nobody wants to call for pizza and get a mortuary. When submitting to directories, make sure to vary anchor text and try to use your keywords in the description and title fields as naturally as possible.

The more valuable and applicable your site is within its directory category, the more visitors (and potential customers and/or linkers) you’ll receive. Additionally, much like search engines, directories tend to promote the most valuable listings higher on the results pages. You should also try to maintain a relationship with the directory. Update your listing as needed and feel free to e-mail them about getting a better or higher listing (especially if you’ve made major changes or seen a big jump in rankings or traffic).

Submit Yourself Here:

A few of the best directories to target as far as getting valuable links are probably the following:

1.Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! Directory is the biggest and oldest directory on the web, and one of the few directories that can send direct traffic. While the $299.00 annual fee may seem steep, a PageRank 8 link is a pretty valuable commodity, especially when it can bring a lot of associated traffic.
2.DMOZ: The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is a free, volunteer-run directory. Google and many other sites pull directory information directly from DMOZ. It’s a Page Rank 8 link and it’s totally free. What are you waiting for?
3.Starting Point: This general directory lists new sites on the same day they’re submitted and users can vote to promote your site. The $99.00 submission fee gets you yet another PageRank 8 link.
4.Business.com: A huge business-related directory. Mostly intended for B2B products and services. PPC sites receive preferential listing, other listings are alphabetic. $199.00 per year for a PR7 link.
5.ExactSeek: This is a relatively large meta tag-based search engine. No specific focus per se, but it is free and PR7. For around $12.00 you can get a featured, top 10 listing for your selected keywords.
6.Best of The Web: One of the oldest web directories around, BoTW provides a solid PR7 link for $69.95/yr or $149.95 one time. Sites are reviewed relatively quickly and listed alphabetically by category.
7.Librarians’ Internet Index: A fairly selective, but free, PR8 directory. They will only include sites with quality, freely available content.
Strongest Links has a complete list of hundreds more web directories you can submit your site to. Keep in mind that PageRank is a very rough approximation of value and, while we mention it as a quick and dirty metric, it’s far from the most important consideration when valuating a link.

SEOmoz on the Yahoo! Directory:
Topic/Industry Specific Directories:

For many content areas there are industry-specific sites and directories you should consider submitting your site to. For example, lawyers may want to join Findlaw and film and television professionals or productions should build profiles at the Internet Movie Database. Do some research to find sites and directories appropriate to your niche.

While we’ll discuss it more in later sections, local organizations and directories such as the Better Business Bureau, Citysearch and local newspaper sites can also be extremely helpful in building powerful links.

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Leveraging Partnership Networks

Posted by Lord Ian at 5:55 PM

SECTION XI
Content Sharing
Revenue and Information Sharing
Cast a Wide Net

This is pretty simple: as with any business relationship, you and your friends or associates can trade or deal in things of value for each other’s mutual benefit. Links, content, traffic and revenue are all things of value, so get creative and start making deals.

Content Sharing:

If you create a great piece of content and let somebody else use it, protocol dictates they have to give you a link crediting you as the original source. If somebody wants to blog about your content, same thing holds true. If you and a partner agree to occasionally mention or share each others’ content, you can not only increase each others’ visibility, but build quite a few reciprocal links.

Keep in mind that you should be careful about who you do this with. If their site is garbage, not only will you have to deal with their sub-par content, but their links will not help you much. Additionally, if you give out lots of links to bad sites, it can hurt the value of your links and your site. You should also request that ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ meta tags be used when your content is published on another site in order to avoid duplicate content issues with the search engines.

Meta robots tags for ‘noindex,’ ‘nofollow’ and various permutations thereof include:






Revenue and Information Sharing:

Much the same as with content, if you partner with someone, you can trade revenue on a project, data or information for links. Anything you have that is of value, whether it be actual money or competitive intelligence, is of value to someone else and worth a link (or several).

Cast a Wide Net:

With any of these partnership tactics you should be careful of drinking too often from the same well. Reciprocal links between you and another site are fine, as long as they don’t appear manipulative to the engines. Search engines view habitual reciprocal links between domains as attempts to spam and less legitimate. As such, do some networking, cast a wide net and partner with lots of different people. It’ll not only benefit your link value and rankings, but your industry profile as well.

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Content Building for Links

Posted by Lord Ian at 6:42 PM

SECTION X
Searching for Content Gaps
Brainstorming Desirable Content
Concepts, Tactics and Styles
Linkbaiting & Viral Media

Okay, okay…you get it: The best way to get good links is to create good content. Enough already! Believe it or not, there is more to this. While good content will tend to get good links, there are strategies you can use to build content specifically designed to get links.

Searching for Content Gaps:

If you’ve followed the advice up to this point, you’ve identified the major players in your niche and you actively participate in forums, groups, posts and blog comments. In all of this research and activity you may start to notice certain trends and questions emerge. If your peers or customers are wondering about a certain topic, wishing for a certain product or tool, or generally speculating about a particular aspect of your industry; they are telling you exactly what kind of content they’d like to read and link to!

If you are astute, clever and quick, you can reap huge rewards by creating content to fill the gaps in what’s currently available. Give the people what they want; it’s really that simple. This doesn’t have to be life changing, industry revolutionizing content. It can be short, it can be humorous, it can be tangential to existing material, it just has to be different from what’s out there at the moment and it has to be something people have indicated they’d like to see. Use the politician’s model: for every one person who takes the time to voice their interest or concern in something, there are 10,000 that feel the same way.

If you see several people discussing how nice it would be if there were a tool that found the number of occurrences of the 20 most frequent keywords on a page, for instance, you could build that tool and watch them flock to your site.

Brainstorming Desirable Content:

All linkworthy content doesn’t have to begin as a eureka! moment gleaned from a stray blog comment. You should regularly sit down and brainstorm content ideas.

Don’t rule anything out in these sessions. Write down every bizarre little whim that comes to mind. While it may seem implausible at first, often you can repurpose or modify the idea into something really great. Let your creative juices flow freely.

Once you’ve squeezed every last drop of creative juice from your brain it’s time to focus, channel and filter everything. Are there ideas that are time-sensitive? What about concepts that can wait for an appropriate bit of news? Which type of content is each idea best suited to: Blog posts, viral marketing, featured articles, tools, press releases? Are you sure? Is there a better way to execute the idea? Would the concept work better for other content you want to cover?

You should look at every idea for both its concept/style (e.g. top ten list, how-to guide, article, tool, etc.) as well as its content/subject matter (e.g. pirates, ninjas, computer viruses, pirate viruses, ninja computers, etc.). These are building blocks, feel free to mix and match.

Concepts, Tactics and Styles:

There are certain concepts that tend to work particularly well for attracting attention and links. As we’ve said, you can plug different content into these style-templates in hundreds of different ways. Some of the most effective and popular concepts for presenting content include:

  • Web Tools: handy applications that perform, streamline or aggregate normally tedious tasks.
  • Widgets: embeddable code or images people can put on their page to calculate or present data (often output from a tool). Browser plugins fall somewhere between tools and widgets.
  • Embedded Content: videos, podcasts, images…any cool, interesting or informative multimedia content on your page can be very popular.
  • Beginner’s Guide to…: This can be serious or tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a popular and easily digested format.
  • How to…: Much like a Beginner’s Guide.
  • Top 10 Ways to…: Actually, lists of any length or manifestation are not only easy to build, but universally popular.
  • Surveys: They’re interactive, they’re anonymous and they give instant feedback for people to comment on. (We suggest Wufoo.com for easy-to-make forms)
  • Polls: Same as surveys. (We suggest Polldaddy.com for free polls)
  • Contests: Everyone loves to win things and/or be recognized as the best. Give away something (anything) or offer an ego-boost to one or more lucky winners and you’ll get attention yourself.
  • Multiple Expert Opinions: Gather a panel of experts and get them to talk about something. If they offer support of conventional wisdom, you’ve provided conclusive proof! If they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, you’ve made the sky fall! If they disagree, the sky might be falling!
  • Interviews: Much in the vein of expert opinions, interviews can be even better if you include them as a video or podcast. Keep in mind that the more well-recognized or famous the participant, the more links you’re likely to receive.
  • Encyclopedia-style Articles: Can’t find any experts? Nobody has a well-defined opinion? Create your own! Become an authoritative source to explain an obscure or confusing topic. Then make a page for it on Wikipedia and link back to yourself.
  • Awards or Recognition: Create a series of awards or superlatives for your field and hand them out. This works best once you have an audience, but everyone will want to receive it and those who win will link back to you to acknowledge the kudos you’ve given them.

Capture of Top 10 Most Popular Stories on Digg – Notice numbered lists at the 2, 4 and 7 spots:

Linkbaiting & Viral Media:

Linkbaiting is the concept of creating content primarily for the purpose of gaining links. This is an incredibly effective link building strategy and is relatively simple in concept, but not always easy in execution.

Large social media and bookmarking portals such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, BoingBoing and others are widely read by tech-savvy audiences that tend to be more than willing to give out links to content they find valuable, interesting or amusing (most of the concepts above are usual suspects). Getting your story or tool on the front page of Digg could be worth hundreds of links in just a day or two.

Any potentially viral content (content that makes its way quickly around the web by word of mouth or, more appropriately, word of blog) can make for good linkbait. Due diligence is required to figure out what tends to gain traction at different sites and then designing something you think will be popular with a portal’s readers. Be warned: getting on the front page of these sites can result in thousands of visitors per hour. Make sure your server can handle the load or your visitors will be greeted with various errors instead of your brilliant content.

Rand very succinctly outlined the four stages of a successful linkbait campaign in his article on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog:

Stage 1: Linkbait Launch
The content is released, shared with prominent bloggers, and submitted to portals like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Netscape.
Stage 2: The Long Tail of Links
If the content gains traction and visibility at widely-read sites, medium and smaller outlets and personal blogs will likely point to it, and RSS feeds of the link and content will spread across the Web.
Stage 3: Residual Traffic and Attention
Even after the initial buzz from your successful linkbait campaign dies down, your site’s traffic may stay on a slight increase due to a “linkbait bump” that keeps users circling back to your site.
Stage 4: Search Engine Rankings
The massive influx of links will cause a direct boost of the link popularity of the content piece, as well as an overall boost in global site popularity—and search engines tend to reward links with rankings.

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