A good SEO has to be a skilled juggler; we have to be able to check everything at once. Crawl errors have to be non existent, new copy has to flow through our sites, we have to run conversion optimisation not to mention coming up with brilliant marketing ideas but on top of all that we need to be building links. We want fresh, powerful and relevant links pointing to our site and no matter how many we get we always want more.

So, just where do you score some good links these days?

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is the in thing at the moment and everyone is doing it. The great thing about guest blogging from an SEO perspective is it gives you the opportunity to write something you know is actually going to be read by humans (rather than just sat on a content farm and being read ignored by search engines). You can choose where the content is going to be placed so you can ensure the link is on topic and not surrounded by Viagra links and prescription drugs. You just need to spend a little time using the right Google operators and searching for blogs in the industry you want and searching for the term guest blog or write for us.

i.e.  “health” + “write for us” or [site:blogname.com] + “guest post”

Articles

OK, so since the latest round of Google algorithm updates content farms have died a very painful death which means a lot of these article sites aren’t as effective as they once were. Article spinning was once the staple of the easy link building campaign but most people are now moving away from them. Article spinning might not have as much value as it used to and yes, if you’re spinning the article yourself you do start to feel your brain melt out your ears after a while, but it can still have some use. So long as you put the effort into making sure your spun content is spun properly you can still get a few links out this method especially if you’re after quantity rather than quality, just don’t use it to prop up you’re entire link building campaign.

Alumni links

I’m not sure how this works in the rest of the world but in the UK university websites that have juicy powerful .edu URL’s have a whole page dedicated to all the special offers their alumni members are entitled to. By offering these universities an exclusive offer from your website you can get a link back from them. Offer 10% with a special discount code or free aftercare or a buy one get one free offer, anything that makes them think they’re getting a good deal. This can be a hard one to do via email so it’s often best to pick up the phone and speak to someone (preferably their web person or someone who understands the value of a link). Just a handful of these links can have a great impact on your campaign.

Competitions

This one follows on from alumni links, have something amazing to offer. Give something away for free and start to shout about it. If you manage the social media properly this should start to build it’s own links but you can always help it along by syndicating round some competition and money saving sites which will quite often have quite a bit of authority. This can also be a great way to get some good PR to your site too, that’s the public relations kind of PR not the Page Rank kind by the way.

Directories

We know to stay away from services that are offering thousands of directory links for a set fee and the vast majority of directories aren’t going to offer much value but there are a few directories that can provide some good quality links. Check the page your link would appear on, if the deeper pages have a good page rank and they put a limit on the amount of links they’ll have on one page it will usually be worth submitting your site especially if they offer a featured listing that will allow your link to appear near the top of the page.

These are just five ways to get the really easy links. In the old days you could offer a link for a link but these days’ reciprocal links don’t have enough value. You need to make sure you have something you can offer in return for a link and ideally that something you’re offering shouldn’t be straight money. Find where you want to get your links from and come up with something new and fresh you can offer them, a special offer for their site’s traffic or some content. Don’t be scared to pick up the phone rather than just relying on your email.

Jessica is an SEO for a no win no fee compensation claims site who specialise in sports injury claims