It’s well known that the only effective and sustainable link building strategy for SEO is content marketing. The emphasis in the last sentence being STRATEGY. Writing content or getting it written for you is a time consuming process, as is finding relevant and valuable places to plant your content. You need to be focused, and use your time and money wisely. The race is on! Everybody is doing it, but many are doing it badly! Here we have listed some top tips to get the most out of your efforts.

Write compelling, unique and useful articles

I know it sounds obvious, but when sourcing and writing articles on a scale that will make any difference to your ranking it’s very tempting to cut corners. I have lost count of articles I have potentially offered to post that turn out to be lame, repetitive and badly written. It’s just not worth churning out or posting mediocre articles, even if it seems like a quick fix to get a link. In our Social Media and SEO training courses we cannot emphasise enough the importance of quality over quantity.

If you offer your guest blog network well written and useful content you will soon begin to build up relationships with some of the better ranking sites. One link from a well established site with a good page rank is worth more than several from poor, content farming blogs.

Target well respected sites in your niche

The best kind of link you can get is from a site that is relevant to the product or service page you are linking to. It’s better to take the time to write really great content, with a particular site in mind, than to blindly churn out content en mass.

Make a note of your target sites social networks and try and get yourself noticed. Retweet their tweets with nice comments added, comment on their blog with well thought out responses and opinions, email them and ask them if there is a post they would like you to write and include links to the best posts you have published on the subject, perhaps suggest a great article idea you have. Find out who is in charge of their content marketing and try and make contact somehow.

Create content worth sharing

Then there is the social sharing aspect. If you want web users to share content, and that is ultimately what you should be aiming for, it goes without saying that your content must be worth sharing. This applies both to the content you publish yourself and that which you give to others.

Think carefully about your links and anchor text.

Make every penny count. What you should ultimately be aiming for is the publication of content that is full of relevant keywords to the target page of your link. Not forced, think about the subjects you could write well that would naturally include the words that you have chosen for your anchor text. Try and put your anchor text link close to those words in the content if you can. If you only have the option to put the link in the byline then think about creative ways of writing your byline. It doesn’t have to be “so and so is a consultant for so and so selling this or that”. What is great about your business or product? Often in my bylines I will write something like “Brighton is one of the most eclectic and interesting cities on the world, what better place to visit if you need some SEO training. To book your SEO training call us on 01273 622272”

You see, there is a call to action there, it reads like a snippet of information rather than a boring footer for a page, and it sells a unique strength of our business (of course if this wasn’t part of a guest post, or if it was an actual by-line, then at least one of the “SEO Training” references would be a link).

Share and Link to everything.

We already know the power of social sharing and the effects it can have on ranking. Maintain as many social networks and social pages as you can, no more. it’s a total waste of time to set up communication channels when you do not have the time or resources to maintain them. Focus on a few, look at your Google analytics to see which are the most valuable and drive the most traffic.

Use these channels not only to promote your own sites but also promote your content on other sites. That way you are naturally varying links whist boosting the ranking of the pages that link to you.

When you are wiring for you own sites you have much more flexibility with where you put your links. Remember to link to other relevant posts on your site with compelling anchor text (this will reduce bounce rate), but also link to your best guest posts on other sites (this will boost the ranking of the pages that link to you). This is a quite often overlooked and quite effective SEO technique.

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At Silicon Beach Training we offer some of the best SEO courses in the UK. We also provide the latest mobile app training courses, PRINCE2 Project Management, Agile Project Management, Business and Leadership courses. If design is your thing take a look at our Indesign and Photoshop Courses. We can advise you about accommodation if you fancy a trip to Brighton by the sea.

Tags: blogging, content marketing