I know what you’re thinking…Oh no not another ‘My Top 5′ or another smart Alec telling you how to link build. Well yes this topic and its formula for success has been repeated by many an SEO and blogger but this is our personal insight into how to squeeze every link opportunity possible out of some great link building techniques. Here are some that we have found have worked or improved our link acquisition.
Gmail Chat
I absolutely love it when my boss turns around to see me conversing on Gmail chat and nudges my chair with an inquisitive
‘What are you doing?’
My simple reply ‘Link building’
Now, not every blogger is sat on their Gmail all day but once you have e-mailed them, they appear on your chat contacts (featured on the left hand side) and are available to talk to at your free will. Gmail chat provides the perfect medium for you to talk to people who you are trying to build links with. For example if you have already built a link with a travel blogger and they are on chat, you can just spark up a conversation. One thing I will say though – is be genuine. I have an interest in setting up my own travel blog so when approaching travel bloggers it is ideal for me to do this! As you get talking of course you can put your link builders’ hat on and start probing whether they have any additional sites or have any contacts where you may be able to guest posts. Not bad getting paid to chat right?
Advanced operators
This is something Prodo Search gives training on to all our new link builders (or as we like to call them-Ninjas!) There are many great lists throughout the web and we even have our own excel sheet where we document any new ones which we happen to find- Here is one of the lists from C Rhadika’s blog which I used as a bible when I first started link building.
One simple operator that I find really useful in any search query is the ‘-’
Ninja code:
“One shall use the minus sign, one shall appreciate the minus sign and one’s irrelevant search results shall be hidden by the minus sign”
If you are typing in an operator that is returning a lot of dud results due to a crossover of a popular term Google smartly allows you to insert a – to take out and filter search results. For example:
Typing in: York + “guest blog”
May return several opportunities which involve ‘New York’ by using the minus operator (-)
York + “guest blog” – new
Google will then filter the word ‘new’ out of the results so theoretically we will have results returned for guest blogs that feature ‘York’.
- A simple, yet effective way of tailoring your quest for link building opportunities.
Buzzzzzing about Buzzstream
This is an ever improving link building tool which is gaining in popularity. What I have to really commend is the level of customer service Paul May and Tim Bramer offer. Buzzstream offers a service where you can monitor and store your link building effectively. Buzzstream offers your company the chance to get rid of the masses of Excel sheets and easily keep track of the relationship stage of building links.
They conduct one to one tutorials through Gomeeting which I personally haven’t experienced before and any queries or modifications you need they will action for you. For example if you want to import a link profile from Open Site Explorer you can now do so using a template. Buzzstream deserves it’s very own post on how it works. As we are still in the process of becoming experts on what Buzzstream can do we will let SEObook explain it for you here.
This is enough for part 1 – part 2 will be published in a few weeks where we will give tips on Myblogguest and relationship building through social media. If you would like to raise any questions about these techniques or have anything from your own personal experience you would like to add please feel free to comment in the section below.
