How to get someone out there on the internet to post a link back to your website? Sounds fantastic, right? In fact, it is real and you can easily verify this by visiting a website – majestic.com to review backlinks to articles on popular websites (times.com, theverge.com etc…).
Organic links to these articles are posted based on two reasons:
- 1. The content that’s published on the site is original and qualitative, written by professionals and experts in a particular field, which in return, gives it a lot of credibility.
- 2. Website has a high traffic, thus it’s content is noticed by lots of people and a certain percent starts to share this content on different blogs, forums, social media, elsewhere.
Link Building
Right away we have a great question: what if such particular website has a zero traffic? To cut the long store short – here is what you can do to drive traffic to a particular URL:
- 1. If your article is really worthy and professional, then you can find websites (blogs, forums, “ask” services etc…) through Google, where people are looking for answers to questions that your article covers and manually leave a link (or a few links as long as you are not spamming).
- 2. Use contextual advertising on Facebook and Google Adwords for distributing your material.
- 3. Use an option of spreading material through social networks, such as reddit; youtube; facebook etc…
- 4. If the article is large and has high-quality content, it can be successfully optimized for long-tail keywords, which Google can give organic traffic for, even to a new, low authority website. Considering that you operate within a low competition SEO segment as most searchers (95%) won’t go pass first search engine result page.
- 5. Different “teazer” networks.
Classical methods of link building
Probably, it’s no secret that links to your website are important factors that influence the position (SERP) of it in search engine results for certain queries.
SEO
Most certainly, you can buy links, but then you start to break the license of search engines (Webmaster Guidelines), which you could pay for greatly in the future. Moreover, purchasing quality links is not cheap at all and it does not guarantee that you will take a top position in search results after you buy a dozen grand links to your site.
Lately, more webmasters (not only customers but website owners too) ignore the fact that the algorithms of search engines are becoming more sophisticated and manipulating SERPs is becoming harder and much more expensive with every year.
Usually, there are two methods of building links to a website:
- 1. Making arrangements with webmasters and placing articles on their websites
- 2. Different types of spam in comments, forums, profiles, joining different catalogs and more.
Yet, quite often, you can find information about “content marketing” and that quality
Content is the “King”. This method is often described as the future of SEO, yet usually no one dives deep into details or provides solid examples on this matter.
There are two types of content:
- 1. Content for the sake of its availability – materials that have nothing new / original in them.
- 2. Professional content – large and detailed materials that solve a problem or provide answers to specific questions.
Perhaps there are loads of alike content, however, it is your article that provides actual detailed step-by-step solutions to the problem.
Here is an example. You can write daily news about robots (millions of them), on the other hand – you can write a more detailed (engaging) article on how to control a child’s toy directly from your phone.
Content for the sake of its availability
Many of the materials (texts), created in the network, are just rewritings of already existing materials without any original information.
For example, you can write a text about linear actuators: what is it, what types are there, describe each type and so on. But there are thousands of such texts online and hardly someone wants to share and link back to such material. In this case – you are unlikely to take top positions in search results for niche queries (long tails), as your article is general and optimized for the exact same queries.
Professional content
If you look at writing articles for the website in a more professional way and start sharing your (or your company employees’) experiences through quality content, showing experiments in projects and correction of mistakes, detailed instructions, etc., then these articles, if consumed, give you an entirely different – positive results.
For example, having the topic concerned with linear actuators, you can create an article on how to automate the gate of a home garage or how to make yourself a home table with an adjustable height (a very popular trend among IT professionals). Moreover, the article should indicate what parts you need to buy, how to install and how to adjust it.
Such articles are much more valued by users: it will be shared, it will be discussed, it will be posted as a link on forums.
In fact, the highest traffic and authority blogs gather audience and backlinks just like that – through high quality and unique content (engaget and theverge are exeptions since most of their topics are alike – yet it does not hurt to check both sites, right?).
If you give a task to a copywriter, who is not educated in programming and does not know how to write about new technologies in developing CMS (content management system), he, at best, will take 3-4 articles that are already online and will just rewrite them to make a “collage”. These texts will be unique, but not original and less interesting, because they are not created by a professional in this field, they do not bring anything new to the table.
Conclusion
I would say, that in order to have an effective content marketing strategy you should follow these steps:
- 1. The texts, which are created according to a specific subject, should be written by professionals who have experience in that sphere who expose new information that is more or less unavailable on the internet so far.
- 2. The content (text, pics, video, voice-over, GIFs, etc…) should be detailed and extensive, without any “wordiness”. Meaning, that full and clear instructions with graphic materials will take place for best content consumption.
- 3. Content should resolve the problem and be conclusive.
PS: More examples
- 1. A company, that deals with Cleaning services can publish typical articles on its blog: house cleaning, dust wiping, floor polishing…
- 2. Or write about complex cases of mold removing in bathrooms, cleaning soft furniture after pets. Write about tough cases that made the company stand out through it’s professionalism and expertise.
- 3. What is better: a text about renovation with no visuals or a step-by-step video “before and after” style?
- 4. Content’s job is to attract those 5-10 fans who would really appreciate the article to the point of sharing and linking to it. Thank you.