So why is it that so many online advertisers continue to stick to the same old tried-and-tested methods? Why aren’t more people stepping outside of the box and thinking of new ways to interact with the target audience and promote their businesses via links?

Try out a few of the promoting ideas listed below and start making your Internet links work for you in different ways and to better effect.

1. Get listed on sites that REAL customers visit

Getting ranked on Google is one of the most important things for any business with an online presence. There is no doubt about it. Google is the most widely used search engine in the world and therefore, ranking on the first page of Google is a must for everyone.

However, there are other great ways of getting links to your site where people who are going to be even more interested in your services or products outside of the Google search. You need to get listed on sites that people are going to when they REALLY want to convert. You need to be visual on sites that clients who are further down the conversion tunnel visit before making a purchase.

Make sure that your business is listed on the following pages if you are looking to link better to your customers and connect your online business to the real world:

Yellow Pages — Yellow Pages is great because it is a directory that huge numbers of people use when looking for services. Therefore, categorizing your business correctly is imperative and getting mentioned on this site is an excellent way of directly interacting with your potential clients.

Google Maps — If people want to find a business close to them, which is common, Google Maps is the site they go to. Get listed on Google Maps and take more advantage of the real customer, in the real world, who is just a few blocks away from walking into your local and making a purchase.

Better Business Bureau — If you get a recommendation from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) you are going to gain the trust of many potential clients. Ranking high on Google search might be one of the most essential things for any company, but getting the thumbs up from the BBB can be the difference between your potential customer choosing to contact your business or the business listed below you on the SERP offering the same services, for example.

2. Blog about yourself or topics related to what you do / offer elsewhere

If you own a flower shop, start blogging (for free if necessary) on other sites about flowers, florists, plants and related subjects.

Offer yourself up as a “guru” on the subject in exchange for a link back to your site. This is a great way of reaching people who are interested on a deeper level in the products that you offer. If they see that you are a person who knows a lot about flowers and looking after plants, they might be more willing to trust you and buy from you (both online and in store if they live close by).

3. Connect your business to YouTube with your own Personal Channel

After Google.com, YouTube is one of the most visited sites across the globe. People spend hours watching videos on YouTube and it is time for every business with marketing campaigns online to start taking advantage of this site’s popularity in any way possible.

If you are an artist and you are trying to sell your paintings, make some videos of the painting process, or create a video which acts as a 360-degree walkthrough of your “gallery” of art work on sale.

Whatever happens, whatever your business, there is always something you can put up on YouTube for people to watch that will help to draw more attention to your business.

4. Be online when your customers are online

There is no point being online and tweeting all day long if your customers are not online to receive those tweets or those emails.

In fact, you need to think about when your potential customer might be in the mood or have enough time to want to open up one of your emails and read what you have sent them.

You could try testing out different times of the day for tweets, Facebook updates or email newsletters until you find the perfect social media networking approach for you. However, this might take some time. If you want to make your online marketing really work for your business you might have to approach this particular area of online advertising with a little more expertise in tow.

There are lots of up-and-coming online services, like Crowdbooster, which can help to show you when to tweet and when to post from the very start. However, you might need to take the time to investigate a little into how to get the most out of these programs as it would be foolish to think that you could get the best out of everything within devoting the time necessary.

5. Social network and make links offline… formally known as “in person”!!!

Whatever happened to the networking parties, face-to-face meetings, face-to-face flirting, face-to-face selling of your product / service, face-to-face closing of deals at the end of an evening full of champagne, dancing and business smiles???

Even though a lot of our world today is managed via the Internet, there are still plenty of opportunities to make business contacts face-to-face and to make hard sales in person.

If you own a tourism business, then you need to attend all the conferences on tourism possible. You need to sign up to seminars and training days that relate to tourism and you need to make the most of your time at these events by promoting your business first-hand.

Do you have up-to-date and attractive business cards to hand out with links to your site attached? If not, why not?!

What should you do first about linking to your customers?

Linking directly to your customer has never been more important in our ever-growing competitive world, but finding the most effective way to link also deserves time, thought and creativity.

Begin by using the ideas outlined in this article, but feel free to expand and move forward with your own ideas as soon as the ideas start flowing.

* David Chapman shares more tips about creating effective links for your business via the Webrageous Blog on a regular basis.

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The complete interview follows …

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In his article, “The 8 Stages Of A Link Building Campaign (+ 40 Free Tools For Total SERP Domination),” Garrett French makes sense out of the complexities of link building by assigning the process to eight separate stages from beginning to end to help guide online marketers on the right path. Along the way, he identifies a variety of free tools for each stage of the process, explaining how the tools he has included fit the individual stages. In total, he lists 40 free tools throughout the eight stages and ends with the answer to a challenge — if he was stranded on a desert island and could only use 5 link building tools, which would he choose?

The complete article follows …

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The option to replace the sometimes tedious and always time-consuming practice of seeking out good quality, relevant and high profile links with a blank check can be overwhelming for some and many will break out their wallets and sign up for an easier ride.

But while buying and selling links is part of the internet commercial cycle, some paid links are more frowned upon than others. Buying a link off a site as part of an advertisement package because your demographics matchup is one thing, while buying links off sites with higher PageRank regardless of their audience and topic is quite another.

As with spam and other black hat SEO methods, Google takes a dim view of websites using paid link acquisition as a shortcut to a better PageRank and better search positions. While you hopefully know enough to steer clear of such a grey area of internet marketing and see the benefit in taking the longer road for more long term pay offs, it may well be that one or two sites competing for the same keyword placements in the organic listings have succumbed to temptation.

Google states that “Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.”

With such a weighting on links, it’s easy to see why buying and selling paid links thrives in the underground of search marketing. But if you’re spending time, money and resources doing things the right way, it’s frustrating to say the least when you come across a site buying paid links as a means of shortcutting the system.

As with other black hat SEO techniques, Google has safety nets in place to alert them to possible problems. One such way is by providing a paid links report form, which you can fill in if you come across a site buying or selling links that pass PageRank, regardless of whether buyer / seller has synergy in quality of site, source of link or theme of the pages in question.

Before you fill in a paid links report, remember that not all bought and sold links are a bad thing. Some links that are sold have a no follow attribute which means page rank isn’t being passed on. This is denoted by a rel=”nofollow” line in the source code.

If you come across a site not using this attribute and buying and selling links purely for ranking manipulation, Google provides a tool in the Webmaster Tools interface.

To submit a report, log in to Google Webmaster Tools and then visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks. The more information you can provide, the easier it is for Google to take action. The form includes a field for the web site you suspect of buying or selling links and a further details form. If the links are concentrated on a specific page, it helps to include the individual domains in the more details form. More often than not, intelligence gathered from these reports helps the search engine to tweak their algorithms and recognize patterns so don’t expect the immediate disappearance of the site buying or selling paid links and falsely trying to establish reputation and quality.

And what if you’re on the other side of the fence?

If you’ve been caught by Google buying or selling links for PageRank purposes, you’ll likely have had your site removed from the listings. This may have been an honest mistake – you may be an advertiser who simply neglected to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute but if you were trying to manipulate the SERPS and want to get back into the engine’s good books, the only course of action is to hold your hand up, recognize you have been caught and resolve to put the situation right.

You can either remove the paid links, ask the website you bought the links from to remove them or add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links on your site that were purchased by advertisers. Only when you are sure that these measures have been followed for each inappropriate link, submit a reconsideration request to Google. Good luck!

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1.  Relationships

When you think about all of the different spammy methods of link building, this one might not seem to fit. But when you skip the link farms, and generic mass emails, there’s a whole world of building links that relies on reaching out to people in a meaningful way. It’s based on building networks, symbiosis and legitimate promotion. When you try getting links that way you’ll find that the relationships you develop hold long-term benefits. Conducting interviews of important people in your niche is one example of such a tactic. Not only do you get the valuable insight of an industry thought leader. In all likelihood if the interview is decent they will link to it and share it with their network. And if you nurture the relationship you may also find an ally for promoting content in the future.

2.  Reputation

Online reputation management is a subset of internet marketing that often gets overlooked. Generally speaking it refers to everything that can be found online in relation to you, your website or your business. Googling yourself isn’t just something to do to kill time when you’re bored, it’s actually something businesses should do fairly regularly. It’s important to know exactly what anyone might find out about you if they were looking for it. That way you can be proactive about spreading goodwill, or try to do damage control if it’s necessary. When you build links that incorporate your brand name, you are creating new citations about your site on the web. These new results, particularly if you manage to get references from authoritative sites, should rank for your name. When you do it right, these occurrences can usurp unrelated or negative mentions that may be ranking in the top 10 for your name and improve your overall online reputation.

3.  Traffic

Links are primarily used for achieving higher search engine rankings so that we will get more traffic. But we often forget that links themselves can bring traffic on their own. When done right, a great link bypasses the middle man and brings visitors directly to you. This isn’t necessarily true of all links though. When you cut corners and get cheap directory links, or drop random blog comments you aren’t likely to get very far with people or search engines. But when you choose your directories carefully, as in look for ones that people might actually use and that don’t exist for “SEO purposes,” then you may get traffic. Also, while blog comment links are no-followed for spiders, when they are attached to smart, observant, insightful comments, people often DO follow them. It can also work when you get links on review posts — genuine ones, not cheap paid reviews from sites with nothing BUT cheap paid reviews. You can also get traffic from links in blog rolls, or guest posts. The point is, good links can help your rankings, and bring people directly to your site. Sure these links take more time to get, and they take more work to earn, but they are so worth it when you do get them.

Conclusion

Obviously search engines are a major part of the life of an online business. And links are a major factor in getting top rankings. But they are so much more than that. They are an opportunity to create relationships, improve your online reputation, and get direct visitors. If you think about link building as drudge work, and only search for low hanging fruit, you probably won’t see advances in rankings or any other benefits. But when you work to make your site linkworthy, and view every contact as a chance to make a friend then you will begin to see link building in an entirely new way. And with your new insight, your view of your site’s future may change dramatically was well.

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1. Client’s Interests and Industries

Just because your client fits a certain demographic, that doesn’t mean you need to restrict yourself to only seeking out links from websites related to their particular industry. If for example you sell tennis rackets, you don’t only need to look at tennis players for link prospects. Look at your products and ask your clients what else interests them and who else they do business with. The tennis racket retailer could extend his link search to include suppliers of hard courts, nets, suppliers of rubber for tennis balls, or manufacturers of the cloth used for grips or sweat bands. Even the manufacturers of shoe laces used in tennis shoes or suppliers of towels could make potential targets for link building.

Rather than focusing just on your type of client, brainstorm the other businesses that your own clients also come into contact with. This method works particular well for those operating at a B2B level because your clients will likely deal with a number of different suppliers in order to make their own product or service as a whole. You can use this to your advantage by also being findable on those related websites.

2. Complementary Industries and Services

No business operates in a vacuum and it’s probable that yours is just one stop on the many roads to your client fulfilling their ultimate aims. If you rent furniture for apartments or offices, why limit your link prospecting to office building or real estate agents? Building a strong link profile necessitates links from a huge range of relevant sources and there are sure to be complementary industries or services that you haven’t yet included in your link building tasks. In the furniture example, the link builder could extend their search to include property lawyers, property management services, gardeners, professional cleaners, and even mortgage brokers or appliance repair services.

The key to a successful approach is to focus on common areas of interest and stress the shared demographic. Article and news ideas are particularly helpful here as they illustrate the relevance of a link for your target site.

3. Identify Your Own Assets

Rather than trying to think of new sites you can approach, turn the whole concept on its head and think about who would want to link to you. Your site is sure to have at least one or two link assets in the form of content or pages that function as link bait. You can identify these pages by assessing the domain page by page, identifying the most useful, unique, and relevant content. You can also look at analytics data to figure out which pages have the lowest bounce rates, highest visitor numbers, longest time spent on the page, and even referrals back to that part of the site. These best performing pages are sure to feature in your links asset list.

Having identified your own assets, you can now start to think about the types of sites that would likely link to those pages or use that resource. Identify at category level and specific website level – it may be a blog post about a new mobile site for example or free software your firm has developed. This could be relevant to technology related sites, bloggers, review sites, etc.

4. Guest Blogging

A common side effect of link building is seeking out guest blogging opportunities. Writing a blog post for an existing blogger is a tried-and-tested method of getting your voice out there and getting a link back to your website. But if you’re finding link building tough, why wait for the opportunity to come to you? Offer to run guest blogs on your own site and you’ll have a pool of willing writers to choose from. Of course, each of these writers will be keen to promote their own site or product, but you can negotiate a link back to your site in return. Most will be happy to promote their guest blog spot by placing a link to your site anyway. You can also use the responses you receive to identify other types of websites and industries that you may not have thought of in any of the previous steps. It could be that a guest blogger has seen a potential link that you haven’t and simply by looking at their site, you’ll realize a whole other industry or vertical is out there just waiting to be targeted by your link building efforts.

There are a multitude of ways you can improve your link building success rate. If you’ve hit a brick wall in thinking of possibilities, consider these four tips. Thinking a little outside the box and using the power of brainstorming can be just the ticket for coming up with new ways to add to your link profile.

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As we head into 2011, what will be important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Andrew Bernero of Relevancy Media — “Pay close attention to what keywords Google Instant suggests when searching for your power terms and make sure that you have pages that are optimized based on those suggestions, whenever those keywords are relevant.”

Bill Slawski of SEOByTheSea – “I’m finally starting to see more people acknowledge how important the structure and taxonomy of a site is to SEO, from organizing the pages of a site in a manner that makes it as easy as possible for a search engine to crawl the pages of a site, to choosing the right words and phrases to label and organize that content, in as customer friendly manner as possible. As important as something like link building might be, a client-based information architecture and site structure adds value to a site in that it avoids duplicate content problems, makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for, helps inform search engines what the pages of a site are about, and enables important keywords and phrases to be used in an appropriate manner that can help pages rank well based upon their relevance to possible queries.”

Charles Nicholls of SeeWhy — “Both Google and Bing now include Facebook posts and tweets in their ranking algorithms. Getting messages to spread virally will be ever more important, as well as getting key influencers (socialites with authority) to use your content.”

David Chapman of  Webrageous Studios — “Content is King! You can waste a lot of time making your keyword density and meta tags perfect. Your time is better spent adding lots of unique content to your site.”

Geno Prussakov of AMNavigator — “The shift towards the growing importance of social media to SEO will continue. One of the bigger news of the end of 2010 was that Twitter and Facebook signals were confirmed to influence search rankings both on Google and Bing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Social is the new SEO, but it is hard to overestimate its importance. Facebook “likes” and Twitter mentions in tweets and retweets are quickly becoming the new links.”

Guy Hill of DroidINDUSTRIES — “I personally have a greater focus on SEM (paid search), but SEO remains top of the list for “must have” programs for marketing. When I work on my own projects, when it’s my money, SEO is top of mind. With clients, the slow pace and mysterious workings of SEO make it a challenge to sell and implement. In terms of what is important, I like content. Old or new, just so long as it has value. In advising clients I push them to identify high-value content that they already have, and get that in front of (more) customers (and spiders). Otherwise, anticipating content that will be important, and pushing out, to gather future attention, can be time well spent.”

Hallie Janssen of Anvil Media, Inc. — “Structured data in the form of rich snippets will take on a larger role in helping to connect users to relevant content based on the intent of their search query. Infographics have really picked up steam over the past year, and when done effectively can bring in tens of thousands of links deep into a site. This is a much more effective and scalable tactic to link building that has been made possible to reach millions through social media sharing behavior.

Jaimie Sirovich of SEOEgghead — Adequately addressing the long tail with the right technologies.

Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People – “Links (acquired via link building and the development of great content) will still account for the lion’s share of Google’s algorithm. As processing powers continue to increase however, Google will take into increasing account actual user behavior and interaction with sites appearing in the search results for specific keywords.  Google will also continue to place more emphasis on personalization. As a result, SEO companies will have to rely more on reporting of actual traffic and cost per lead or cost per acquisition metrics, than actual rankings.

Joe Griffin of iAcquire — “Link building needs to stand alone in the SEO budget. It needs to be treated very seriously, and a holistic approach is required. It’s all about reaching out to relevant webmaster, modifying inadequate existing link text, building tools for link bait, etc. Anchor text usage, ramp up and ramp down all need to be carefully planned.”

Magnus Nilsson of BraveNewMe — “Deeper integration of social (e.g., Facebook likes and twitter updates) into the SERPs will continue to emphasize importance of social as part of the SEO strategy.”

Patrick Hare of Web.com Search Agency — “Anything that makes a site appear more legitimate to a search engine will be important for top rankings. Google is listing verified “places” results for local searches, and newer search engine models are using “curated” results in order to cut down on the indexing of spammy sites.”

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Watch for next week’s entry which covers what is ahead for online marketers in 2011 as far as pay-per-click marketing is concerned.

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Without pretending to be a legal wizard, there are two things in particular to consider before embarking on a competition campaign in your SEO and social media efforts.

1.   What local laws apply? For example, in Sweden you can’t have a straightforward prize raffle targeting Swedes without the proper license (which is very difficult to get). Instead you have to add an element of skill into the competition as in this social campaign that asks the audience a knowledge-based question about the website in question. While you might not want to target snowy Sweden, there are similar laws around the world that needs to be followed.

2.  Are you compliant with Facebook promotional guidelines? If the aim of the competition is to achieve more Facebook fans, you need to start off by reading through the official Facebook guidelines, which as of writing were last updated on December 1^st 2010. In order to avoid Facebook becoming a new home for spammers, you’re basically not allowed to require people to do wall posts, upload photos or status updates in order to enter the competition. You’re not even allowed to notify winners through Facebook. This means that you will need to capture their details elsewhere (which can be a Facebook application). You can, however, have a contest that’s only open to fans, and that has additional elements and capture their contact details.

It’s also absolutely key to understand the differences in execution depending on objectives. It’s a big difference to create campaigns with the aim of going viral for brand exposure, achieving fans for loyalty, or building quality links for search engine rankings.

If you’re after inbound links, you need to build this element into the competition and target an audience with on-topic sites. Again, you need to be aware of Google’s webmaster guidelines and be a little more clever than simply having an inbound link as a requirement of entry, in order to avoid looking like a spammy link buyer.

Ultimately you are probably after all of the above objectives. This can be difficult to achieve in a focused manner with a single competition. The risk of this approach is that, depending on your resources, your campaign will lack focus and not achieve real success with any objective.

If you’re considering launching your first competition, I suggest a single objective campaign. You can by all means use several channels for this, but by focusing on a main KPI, e.g. fans, view or inbound links, you will be better focused and more likely to achieve success.

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The biggest change is how Google views links and the value derived from each one.  Anything gamed is extracted – Matt Cutts’ team is clearly driving a clean-up process.  But a well-crafted and thought-out link building campaign focused on targeted high-quality sites is still very powerful  for gaining success in search engines.

Here are five great articles to help you get started with link building.

5 Tasks Toward Planning A Manual Link Building Campaign

Rebecca Appleton provides an excellent step-by-step breakdown on how to plan a manual link building campaign.  By following these steps, you’ll reduce your frustrations and focus your efforts on a high return link building process.

Linking Analysis – Making Sense of the Mess

A successful link building campaign starts with finding and using the right link analysis tools.  Link building guru Eric Ward breaks down the various types and provides insight into the tools best suited for a successful linking campaign.

Targeting High-Quality Sites For Links

Chris Stiner takes one step from Rebecca’s plan for a link building campaign and focuses on how to target high-quality sites.  Building relationships the old-fashioned way plays an enormous role in landing high-quality site links.  Chris states that you need to develop a plan tailored to a particular site to understand what it will take to get a link from them.

Are You Using Directories In Your Link Building?

While attending conferences, I have heard mixed reviews about the value of directories for gaining links.  In this article, Rebecca agrees – to an extent — and offers four outstanding pointers that will help you make the most out of your directory submission activities.

Think Before You Link Bait

Link baiting (using compelling content to draw attention (and links) to your website) is still a great way to acquire links.  However, in this article, Andrey Milyan identifies a number of important challenges to consider before choosing your link bait content.  Don’t get fancy or you may gain more than a few potentially worthless links.

Want to read more about link building?

Check out all of Search Marketing Standard’s link building articles.

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For some websites, a time-consuming manual link building campaign is a necessary evil as the industry within which the site operates is very competitive from an SEO standpoint. An online dating website, for example. would expect to have to carry out manual link building, as it is the most effective way of building the good quality links needed to make a difference to search engine rankings. A website selling tea pots would likely not need to invest time or money in a manual link building campaign, as the industry is less competitive. This means that lower quality links such as those generated from social media activity or directory submissions would suffice.

For sites in competitive industries, assigning someone to seek out good quality links and then spend time in conversation with the target website, perhaps discussing ways to obtain the link or creating content that can be published on the desired site with a link, is a sensible and strategic way to allocate SEO hours. Manual link building shouldn’t be confused with link buying. Simply spending time buying up lots of links around the net is not an effective manual link building strategy.

Task 1: Cost and Budget Management

Buying links for PageRank or SEO purposes violates Google’s guidelines and a form to report sites you suspect of using paid links can be found in the Webmaster section. Most sites however will admit to buying at least some links from sites that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to build a referral from. This conundrum should form part of your link building preparation and planning.

If you do decide to buy selected links as part of your manual link building process, you must first make a very conscious decision to purchase only links from sites that are extremely relevant to your own and of a very good quality. It’s also wise to have exhausted other avenues such as news or article submission first. To help you stick to that decision, assign a limited budget to the acquisition process. Working to a figure quoted in your marketing plan or taken from your SEO budget will make you much more likely to turn away from the temptation to buy as many links as possible to make the link building process quicker and easier. The value of the link should dictate how much you are willing to pay for it, but you may also want to stipulate a cap on how much you are willing to pay per link. This will also give you cause for a rethink if you come across a site charging more than you can comfortably afford.

Task 2: Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis should form the bulk of your plan, since a detailed understanding of how your competition is bettering you will dictate exactly how many links you need to aim for and the likely length of time your manual link building task is going to take. Finding competitor link backs can be done fairly easily with a site such as the Open Site Explorer Tool. Going through the report and analyzing the quality of link takes a little longer. However, this can provide a blueprint for your own link building process by highlighting just how many good quality links your competition has and how far ahead of you they are in the link count. An in-depth study of factors such as page authority, PageRank, and anchor text must then follow.

Task 3: Keyword Research

If your keyword list is quite small and you only wish to link build on a handful of phrases, the keyword research part of your plan may well be fairly short. However, if your SEO campaign is built around a large number of keywords, you’ll need to perform competitor and keyword analysis on any number of phrases. You’ll also have to decide if your efforts will be split between a mass of keywords, or if you’ll focus your manual link building on just a few select phrases.

Task 4: Identifying Link Targets

There are many ways to find potential link providers with the competitor research portion of the process likely to throw up a good few possibilities. Finding relevant sources will be an ongoing task and can be very time consuming. Deciding on the method or methods to be used is a milestone in the manual link building process – it pays to test a number of different routes before deciding on the most effective for your needs. Using data gathered from competitor research is a popular approach, but other strategies you may wish to consider include typing your keyword into Google and then trawling through the results, using a directory such as DMOZ as a starting point, or working through a target list of relevant newspaper, ezine, and magazine sites.

Task 5: Deciding On the Approach

The use of link buying as a possible manual link building process was discussed above but you’ll also likely want to consider other approaches and use bought links as sparingly as possible. Particularly for small businesses, buying links will simply be cost-prohibitive when the cost of the link and time needed to negotiate the contract terms and duration are factored in. A far more sustainable approach for a long-term manual link building plan is to identify other options. These options can be many or few, depending on previous experience, success in initial testing, and the depth of keyword and competitor research.

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