Aaron Shear, of Boost Search Marketing, just finished speaking at a PubCon session on linkbuilding. His session focused on the challenges ecommerce sites experience while trying to build links and offered ideas for building links. He started off by saying that it is easy to tell someone to think big and try to build links for quantity over quality. However, while that worked well five years ago, it is very difficult to do today.
Partner/Affiliate Programs:
Do you have an affiliate program? Unfortunately, most of the major commission programs make the link uncrawlable. If you have a big enough brand, changing from a program to a custom solution can be of great value. A custom link solution that sends the traffic to the affiliate, but sends the link directly to the site can work great.
Irresistible Linkbait:
Widgets can add serious value to third-party sites and as a result can be worth a huge amount of linking value. This could be as simple as a widget or plugin for a blog that provides a sizing chart for a pair of shoes.
Reach Out to Bloggers:
Do not simply ask a link — the majority of bloggers do not monetize their blogs. Instead, send a bunch of bloggers a free gift card and ask them to write reviews with links.
Social:
Google is increasingly considering social signals. Although +1 seems to be especially impactful, even Facebook Likes seem to be performing well. Also, Twitter links and some bookmarking based sites can really add value to the SEO tactics. With all of these tactics, push the users to low bounce rate pages that encourage the user to interact with it.
Pressing the Press:
Every educated and un-educated book on SEO says to write press releases. Do not send out endless press releases constantly – only send out newsworthy press releases.
