In the digital age, the foundation of a successful business is a high-quality website that stands out from the crowd and positively represents your brand’s message. With billions of active websites on the internet, it can be tricky to know where to start in terms of promoting your website and ensuring that it gets seen by your target audience.
An important tip is to never over complicate things and become overwhelmed with a long list of ‘to-do’s’ that seems to never get ticked off. Start with the basics then work yourself up slowly step by step. To give your website a head start, we’ve created a guide to free link building, guaranteed to kick-start a quick road to success.
6 Ways To Achieve Free Link Building
It’s a known fact that link building can be very time consuming and it is often a long-winded task that, at first, seems pretty futile. You often do not see a dramatic immediate result, building links does take time, which is why many business owners go wrong and give up. But putting the time in at the very beginning and working hard to get your business out there on as many quality channels as possible is so worth it, here are just some of the key ways we recommend to incorporate link building into your marketing campaigns.
Social Media
Social media is key, a positive, likeable social media presence is guaranteed to keep the sales and enquiries flooding in. One of the best ways to build links back to your website is to jump on the latest social media trends, this can be anything from trending hashtags to breaking news. Be the first people to talk about it, make a fuss, be memorable. Creating posts that stick in peoples memory means that the next time they are in need of a product or service you provide, they will automatically think of you.
We’re all guilty of seeing a tweet that is going viral with thousands of likes and retweets, then clicking onto the page to see more, so use this to your advantage, be the page users will click onto. If you’re unsure on what’s trending, take a look into local and national hashtags. For example, to commemorate Love MK day recently, MKFM started the hashtag #LoveMK in which whoever used it would be retweeted onto their page. This would have been fantastic for small, local businesses in the Milton Keynes area to raise brand awareness. We could even look into the recent Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, millions of users were using the #RoyalWedding hashtag, so this would have been the perfect opportunity to create a fun, attractive tweet adding the trending hashtag.
We understand that it can be tricky to keep on top of every spot of breaking news when you’re busy with other daily tasks, so to make it a little easier, make use out of Google Alerts. You can set up an alert for a number of keywords related to your business and whenever a news story is released relating to one of these topics, you will receive an alert email, making social media management considerably easier.
Directories
Directory listings are one of the main traditional forms of link building. If you are a small, start-up business, focus on adding to local directories to start, then moving on to a larger scale, national listings when you have more of a regular customer or client base.
Focus less on trying to get your business on every directory possible and more on opting for those of high authority. A few high authority links are hugely more beneficial than several low authority sites. A great tool to test the authority of a website is the MozBar, this informs you of the sites domain authority. We suggest to only submit to ones with a domain authority higher than 30.
As a business owner, you can afford to be fussy with where your business is listed, the last thing you want is to submit your information to an unreliable site that may damage your reputation.
When it comes to adding a description to a directory listing, make each entry unique. Of course, your contact details and business name must always be consistent, but to avoid the issues of duplicate content, create a unique description showcasing your business for each entry.
Guest Posts
Seeing a company’s name mentioned by your favourite magazine or blogger must make it reliable, right? If your answer is yes, then use this to your advantage for your business!
Guest posting is all about getting your content out there, but on another businesses website, whether this may be a publication, popular magazine, blogger or simply an industry related website that features a blog. When suggesting a guest post to another company, never go ahead and write for them if they refuse to add in a link back to your website, that’s the whole point of spending time on the task.
To find companies to potentially guest post for, try out searching one of your keywords into Google followed by one of the following terms: blog, guest post, blogger or a guest writer.
Offer Discounts
To follow on from our previous point on guest posts, a great way to encourage bloggers or social media influencers to either upload one of your posts or mention you in their latest blog or vlog is to offer them a discount. This idea is mainly aimed at product based companies who can offer a small percentage of the original prices in return for a link back to their website.
Internal Linking
Effective links are not just limited to external sites or businesses, you can receive just as many benefits from internally linking on your own website. Internal links are great because you can add as many as you require and can maintain a strong focus on your priority keywords. Links can be added to articles, case studies, success stories and even incorporated into landing page content. Although you must be careful with linking internally as it can be easy to force links that may be entirely necessary, always make sure that the links flow in nicely rather than obviously forced in.
Lastly and Most Importantly, Socialise!
Our sixth idea to link build for free is one of the easiest and in fact, most enjoyable. One of the best ways to get people browsing through your website and making conversions is to talk to them directly about what your company can offer them. Always make sure that you sneak some business cards in your pocket or bag before any potential networking event or opportunity, you never know when you may end up socialising with the perfect customer or client!