5 crafty outside the box link-building tricks & tips
by Patrick Gavin Strategy
Readers, the following is a guest post from Tom Clitchlow of Distilled.
1) Ensure you pick up all pages that mention your site but donât link to you.
Iâm going to let you in on a secret
here…. Not everyone on the internet links to external websites, and when they
blog about your site or mention your site they may not link to you. Thatâs
right, some people donât know how to, some people donât feel the need to, some
people havenât even thought about it and some people are just plain lazy. This
means that if you can find these people that talk about (but donât link to)
your site then contact them, ask them to simply add a link to your site where
they have mentioned it and hey presto, you have a nice relevant and topical
link! Getting these links is like taking candy from a baby and in some cases
you can even get decent anchor text.
So how do you go about finding these pages
which mention you but donât link to you? The manual way is to run searches such
as:
http://www.sitename.com
âsitename.comâ
âsitenameâ
Donât forget to run these searches in
Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati (and anywhere else with a search function!).
Just remember that often the top results will all link to you anyway
(especially with the full url searches) so be sure to crawl all the way through
the results.
You can also set up some automation to
automatically find new pages/blog posts about your company. Google Alerts is
one way, I prefer our Reputation Monitor which is a tool for monitoring your online reputation but has some interesting
applications as a link building tool.
2) Gain links from people trying to hot-link your images.
If you run a site of any size or any worth
then you will almost certainly have plenty of images on your site which people
will want to steal, borrow, pilfer or just blog about. Patrick Altoft has written a fantastic
script which allows you to gain links from anyone who is looking to use your
images. Go read the post here.
Just try it for yourself, click the link then right click the image at the top!
Note: This script doesnât prevent people
hot-linking images, in fact it actively encourages it but makes sure that people
give you a link back at the same time. For sites with many images, and in
particular sites with striking images itâs a must to install this script
Patrick recommends only showing this script
to people who come via Google images, I think it depends on what kind of site
youâre running. You could probably build an entire site around image
optimisation and using this script to generate back-links. Read more about image optimisation
from Caydel.
3) Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
This tip comes courtesy of SEOmoz. The idea is very simple and plays on peopleâs
egoâs. In a nutshell, the sites which already rank for your target key phrases
are the holy-grail of links, but it can often be difficult to get links from
them since you are by definition in competition with them (in the SERPs at
least!). So how about creating a competition, or award and handing it out to the
top ranking sites in your sector? Everyone loves awards and the chances are
that people will then link back to the source of the awards. If you want to get
a bit more crafty about this you can even host the awards on a separate domain,
to make it look like youâre not affiliated with it then simply 301 the domain
back to your site at a later date.
Matt was the first one to publicly
announce this trick in one of the whiteboard
Fridayâs but itâs clearly been something SEOmoz have been doing for a while… Case in point? Which built over 100,000 backlinks. Wow!
4) Flamebait â like linkbait only flame grilled.
This one is slightly more left-field than
the others and I wouldnât recommend doing this unless you were sure what youâre
doing and also donât mind a bit of a word-fight! The basic premise? Find a way
to get sued. Working on the any PR is good PR (and equivalently, any links are
good links) Andy Beal blogs about the subject in more depth here.
The holy-grail for this tactic is to get sued by a company who no-one likes,
that way you can get the social media crowd on your side! Other, slightly less
dangerous, ways of doing this are to just be controversial or get threatened by
someone who doesnât understand the internet.
Aaron Wall also mentions this tactic
briefly here. Number 63 on the list.
5) Keep it funny schmuck.
Iâll leave you on a high note with a little
bit of humour. Next time someone famous in your industry makes a big
announcement spend 30 mins with your favourite photo-manipulation software
(mineâs the gimp) and come up with (something funny) .
Note that to make this work you need to
ensure that the you donât offend the original poster (unless youâre looking for
a fight, see point 4) and to keep it light-hearted. Spread the word about your
post and as the original announcement grows, so does word of your amusing
pictures. The ideal candidate for this is a blogger who likes to have a chuckle
â aiming this at someone serious probably wouldnât have as much of an impact
(thatâs why we picked Rand! 
If this gets a good response you never know, I might be invited back to post
again! Either way, if you liked what you read then you can read more from me
and the Distilled guys over on our blog.
