5 Links Most SEO’s are missing out on

Traduction francaise: La Plupart des OMR passent à Côté de ces 5 Liens

Wiep came out with 69 solid tactics to link building in 2009. In it he breaks down internal linking and external links. His entire post was high quality but I’m a little disappointed that we can’t comment to provide feedback, but that’s aside the point, it’s still a great resource J. As you go through all 69 tactics each one has SEO in mind but only one takes a real holistic approach to internet marketing #26 ‘join an affiliate network’. My goal is to rehash that tactic but also add 4 other links that I think many SEO’s are missing out on.

1. Affiliate link to a great product

Principle: The point of adding an affiliate link is not for SEO, it’s for generating continual income from a blog post or article. Word of caution; don’t push a product that you know nothing about or are not a member of because you risk the chance of being found out as a hypocrite (promoting a product you don’t have).

Application: If your blog is about SEO, link to SEObook or SEOmoz or make up your own type of product that you can generate residual income. Ideally, your own product would be better but if you don’t have those resources, start with someone else’s product that you respect and admire.

Bonus tip: Talk to the provider and add your own incentive to the sign up process. Don’t only talk about how ‘how great’ this product is, make it more palatable by adding 10% off their purchase or a free pdf (something), but make the pitch sound more enticing than just the affiliate product. Word of caution; Some providers might not like an incentive but check with the provider, some don’t mind.

2. Subscribe RSS via other options

Principle: You don’t want to box in your readers. Some people like to read your feed other ways than just strictly RSS feed readers. Email, Twitter, and other forms help give people choices, we all like choices. Let them pick how they want to read your material. TechCrunch is a great example, for all of us to follow, they have 4 links to subscribe to their RSS feed (really 7+ links, if you count the 2 links at the bottom of the page and one in the browser. And if you wanted to get technical, counting the in-post links would mean even more links to RSS) Also, by adding different ways to subscribe your providing more ways to broadcast your site’s voice, which can help in a long-term strategy for your site online.

Application: Over two years ago Feedburner looked inside of TechCrunch’s (then) 110,000 subscribers (now 1.5 million). It showed how 4% of his subscribers were from email (that was then 4k people!!) . In addition to this, TC uses their Twitter account primarily to send updates from their account, which currently has 33k people following him. Finally, they made an IE & FF plugin. Which I’m pretty confident sent their subscribers skyrocketing. As Michael A says at the bottom of the page “If you have a website, this is a tool you may want to offer”.

Bonus: In addition to talking about your website’s feed within your posts, make a landing page for your feed and promote the page, via online & offline advertising. You’d be surprised how many people will subscribe through these various tactics.

3.Email Newsletter

Principle: Building your in-house email list is tremendously valuable. For example, According to MarketingSherpa, House Email marketing has more ROI than SEO.

Application: On every page, place a quick email signup form and within related posts and add a link to your email signup-landing page. Word of Caution: People are hesitant to give you their email, so make sure you say ‘no spam’ and ‘we will not sell, rent, nor trade your email address’. Saying this can increase your email signups by 10% (the source link evades me but the logic remains true).

Bonus: Get your email-landing page to rank in Google for a long tail term. Add incentives for signups!!!

4. Share This (not the wordpress widget)

Although all 5 links are important, this is my personal favorite link. It’s under-valued and not taken as a top 10 priority for many site owners, where I believe it rightly should be placed. For our upcoming free SEO webinar, 10% of subscribers used this link to share our webinar with others. Imagine if you had 100k people on your landing page and only 1% shared the link, that’s an additional 1,000-3,000 people seeing your landing page for free!!

Principle: If people like your product or webpage, they want to tell their friends. Make it easy for them to tell their friends.

Application: Don’t just have ‘share-this’ widget in wordpress. Add the link throughout the blog post. If you make a solid point in an article, end the paragraph with ‘recommend this page’ or some catchy anchor text, that let’s them know they can share the page. Be obvious, so that they can share the page with ease. Word to the wise: Don’t act like it’s something to that needs to be milked like the affiliate link or email newsletter link, this is something people want to do, so just make it available to them outside of the "share this" link at the bottom of the post.

Bonus: I’m sure you can modify this and customize it but I’m just using this script "as is". It’s a free tell a friend script, what it does is when the user clicks on ‘share this’ or ‘recommend this’ (or whatever anchor text you want) it creates a popup (not spammy, they requested it by clicking the link) and the user can fill out the required info and we share the page with their friends. The best part is you get to see the emails, so you may ask them to opt-in to your email newsletter. Also, there is an advanced tell a friend script. Use with intention. 🙂

5. PPC Link

This link can be used from many different angles but I’ll only attack this with one angle. That of, when your page is ranking for a short-tail keyword rank in Google, use PPC. The point is brand recall. At the end of the day, who doesn’t want their company’s name to be remembered? 🙂

Principle: According to ComScore, you can increase your brand recall rate by 146% if you have a top organic listing with top sponsored listing.

Application: If your ranking (#1) for 5 high volume keywords, bid for the top sponsored listing.

Bonus: Do it for your competitors. 🙂

Conclusion: A holistic approach to marketing a website is the best tactic to play in 2009 and any year thereafter. Getting outside of the SEO world and broadening your site’s horizons will make a larger impact for your company. Staying strictly with SEO is like only eating meat. Whereas, vegetables, fruits, breads, and even fats are good for you, just make sure it’s all balanced and in moderation. These 5 links, touch the surface of non-seo internet marketing. Happy linking!

Joshua Sciarrino is Owner of Refuge Design, a company that believes in holistic internet marketing. We currently are having a FREE SEO webinar in less than a week and are giving away 250$(on Dec. 15th; signup now). Follow me on twitter and join our Facebook group.

Images courtesy of MarketingSherpa and comScore

Traduction francaise: La Plupart des OMR passent à Côté de ces 5 Liens