Ok, so you are competing with thousands of other sites online to grab those amazing links to ensure you are able to grab top rankings. In today’s search engine optimization marketing field you must work smarter instead of harder.  I have been thinking about the same thing and I came up with some great ideas that are outside of the box and save you time as an seo consultant.  I will cover several ideas below in this article.

Use popular sites to your advantage!

Go over to Alexa’s top 500 sites for your country and you will find a lot of great sites that you can actually obtain links from if you try to work hard at it. I know you can obtain links from a Myspace page, Yahoo Directory, Google (Know, etc), Google Business directory, Youtube (nofollow attribute links – not sure how much they benefit you), Facebook, Ebay (about me), Amazon, and more!  These sites are highly trusted and I am sure a link from them won’t hurt.  You can even post in Yahoo’s and Google’s social sites as well as in Yahoo’s discussion groups.

Search for sponsorship sites

Go over to google and search for something that pertains to your company. If you were a Texas marketing company you should search for the terms: sponsor “Texas marketing” – Contact these sites and request to support their site and ask for a link in exchange.

Google Alerts!

Setup google alerts to notify you of certain web pages popping up that could help your company.  If you are a site that sells baby clothing, you could setup an alert for any new sites talking about baby clothes and contact them to arrange a way of obtaining a link on their site. The reason this works so well is that you won’t be contacting stagnant sites, you will probably get a quick response from the site owner.

Offer to contribute on other sites!

Find blogs that are popular about your main focus or specialty and offer to write up some content for a blog posting. Obviously include your link, and voila! You received a great quality link on a page specific to your content.

Using link directory programs to your benefits

There are several link directory programs out there, such as PHPLD that can allow you to find high quality directory links easily! Lets say you have a SEO site and needs directory links. Try searching the the GOOG for this phrase:
“Description:” “To validate the reciprocal link please include the following HTML” intitle:seo

What we searched for was all pages with the term SEO in their title, We also tied in specific words that every PHP Link Directory site uses on their submission page. Pretty neat huh?

Start several small blogs pointing to your main site

I always recommend a quality blog on your own site to really promote new content to your own web site, however it is a great idea to get a blogger account, wordpress account, Create squidoo pages, yahoo mybloglog, myspace, linkln, facebook and some other sites and use them to your advantage.

Promote your site with articles on high ranking sites

There are tons of high traffic, Google trusted sites that allow you to obtain great links easily by submitting an article.  Also use sites like GoArticles, Articlebase, PRLog and more to get some great article recognition.  Also submit articles and content to sites related to your industry.

Social Bookmark Quality Content

Social bookmarking is one of the easiest things to do in order to get the word out about your site and grab some quality links from these highly trusted & popular sites.  Go ahead and Furl it, Sphinn it, Squidoo it, reddit, Digg it, etc.  With my SEO articles I love to Sphinn them and add them to Technorati, they provide great links.  If you have a wordpress blog install a Social bookmarking plugin like the one found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-bookmarks/

Chase down your competitions links

So is one of your competitors blowing you out of the water? Well its time to pull up their inbound links using yahoo search. Go to yahoo.com and perform the following search:   Links:urlhere.com

This will help you to find out where the great links are coming from and it will allow you to hunt them down like a vicious predator :-0

Get links that get clicks!

I always recommend getting links that get clicks, this will help to alleviate the waiting game for traffic from search rankings

Link building offsite then utilize 301 forwards

I don’t personally do this, however a lot of people do. If you have a site that is hard to obtain links to, you can create another site with unique content and then later forward the inbound links to your site.  This is something you should consider for yourself and determine whether it is worth it to you.

Get involved and meet your competition

Get involved in forums and build relationships, then determine how you can help each other succeed with link exchanges and work together to produce other valuable relationships.

Forum link building

A great thing to do is find forums and get involved. However you should put your links in your signature so you get some value from forum posts. Search using a phrase like this:
“search engine optimization” Vbulletin

You will find a large nnumber of forums on the topic of search engine optimization that you can easily join and start talking.  Each time you talk on here is a link you will drum up that is targeted.

Hopefully these tips helped, I recommend thinking outside the box because status quo simply won’t cut it in the link building community any more.  Best of luck.

Joel McLaughlin – Copyright 2008 – DataFlurry Arizona Search Engine Marketing