We recently examined how the link gathering process has been transformed in recent years and is encouraging online marketers to be a little more intelligent than simply spreading a few ‘please swap links with us’ emails. That article seems to have really caught the attention of our readers and we’ve had a fair few emails asking us what kind of strategies we would recommend for this brave new world of search. The answer is to be a bit creative and to think outside the box as to how you can attract unsolicited links.

Here are just three examples of methods we’ve tried and tested to get a diverse selection of links on our clients’ behalf.

1) The Freebie

This one has been very successful for us in providing some excellent one way links. The principle is this: we ghost-write an article for our clients on an area they specialise in, and submit it to various article repositories online. Once submitted we, in essence, give licence for this to be copied by anyone.  The beauty of this is that every time someone “takes” our article, they have to take our boiler plate, where we’ve placed a keyword rich anchor link back to our client’s site.  This viral process helps us achieve additional links and branding for our clients.

Here’s an example for you to look at, written on behalf of one of our oldest clients, Captivating Cuba. Note the anchor text in the article - “Cuba holiday specialist”. 

Looking at the results of this, at the time of going to press Captivating Cuba are number 1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN for that search term – a very relevant key phrase!

2) Viral Content

A slight problem with ‘The Freebie’ is that often people will read the articles, find them interesting but link to the article repository hosting the piece, rather than our clients’ sites. So how do we create something on our sites that people will link to naturally? The answer to this often involves dropping the seriousness of day-to-day business and trying something a little more unconventional. Take the page we created for Simply-Docs, an old client of ours specialising in legal document templates. This page of CV bloopers is fun, throw away and amusing – just the kind of thing that people love to spread around the internet. But how do we get this page found in the first place? A solid Web PR, submitted to the online news engines and some social book marking resulted in a large amount of references to our CV Bloopers concept being spread across the net.

3) The Web 2.0 Experience

We see a lot of online marketing agencies touting the benefits of Web 2.0 for SEO, but very few solid examples of what this really is or how it’s done. As part of our ongoing experimentation of different Web2.0 platforms, we have lately been experimenting with social-search engine Squidoo. We created a page about job hunting for Puregenie – a client of ours specialising in online travel jobs. While placing the link in an informative article about job hunting, we provide a thematically connected one way link – just the kind of thing search engines like. And once again we get to pick the anchor text (online travel jobs).  As a result, we have achieved some good results in search engines for the key phrases that are important to our clients.

Get the ground work started and the links should snowball!

There’s hundreds of ways to get links, and yet people often seem to have no ideas over how to cultivate them. We acknowledge that the above examples, albeit just 3, all require an investment in time and creativity but, from our experience, produce much better results for our clients. They’re also a great way to get your site’s brand noticed which, in the long run, should make achieving links that bit easier: Essentially, if you write killer content on a consistent basis the links should flow naturally to you because people love to share the good stuff they find online. All 3 of the above (and other similar methods) can help by getting the initial word out, and can ultimately change an initial trickle of links into a links waterfall!