Linking Strategies

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SEO Link Building Using Delicious Wil Reynolds SEER Interactive - Oct 20, 2009

The more links to your site from quality websites, the higher you'll rank on Google. But obtaining quality links is getting harder. In my pursuit of quality links I often turn to the social bookmarking tool Delicious (www.delicious.com). It allows you to link to sites you like and then categorize these sites using keywords called "tags." You can also explore sites that others have tagged that might be related to your needs.

Delicious is definitely worth getting acquainted with. You can use it to categorize your link building efforts as well as a discovery tool to find new ways to get links. Let's look at four strategies.

1. Use Delicious to categorize link building opportunities

Here's how Delicious.com can help you organize your link building project.

Before you start, however, you'll want to install the Delicious bookmarking plug-in for your web browser (delicious.com/help/bookmarklets). NOTE: To keep your research private, you may want to check the "mark as private" option.

a. Develop "smart query" keyphrases

Start with a "smart query," that is, a keyphrase that will bring back search results for sites that are likely to accept submissions or link to your site. If you have some open source software, for example, a search query like "open source software list" or "open source software directory" is likely to help you find places to submit your site. Two great tools can help you find "smart queries." Try each of them to see what I'm talking about:

• SoloSEO Link Search Tool (soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html)
• SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/)

The results that come back are full of linking opportunities.

b. Categorize the results with Delicious

Now, when you find a useful search result, add it using your Delicious bookmarking plug-in, categorizing each link by the linking opportunity type: make a pitch to a blogger, add a resource, leave a comment, or submit to get a link.

You can delegate this task. Once you find some useful "smart queries" that produce fruitful search results, use this approach: Have an assistant or intern go through the top 100 or so search results, adding each to Delicioius and categorizing each link with tags. Later, when you're ready to execute a link building campaign, you already have a huge list to contact that is already prepared, categorized, and queued up for you to start submitting your information and getting links.

One value of using Delicious is that you can see how others have categorized content -- especially your competitor's content. Don't forget explore competitor URLs and other top content URLs (http://delicious.com/url/) to see what tags come up.

2. Use Delicious to find the most popular content in your industry -- to give you content ideas

One of the best ways to get great links is to create great content. But what can you write about that people care about and want to link to? Start by finding the most popular tags in Delicious: http://delicious.com/popular/

I entered "snowboard" as my tag: http://delicious.com/popular/snowboard

The search results reveal that the most popular webpages for the term "snowboard" are one with 15 cool designs, another with a design contest, and another related to music geared to pumping up snowboarders.

All of those are already labeled as "popular" by people linking to these sites, who, in essence, "vote" for them, and tag them with keywords so they can find them again. Of course, feel free to take a different angle to some of these popular topics. They can spark some great ideas.

Using Delicious's form of "social voting" can help you determine popular topics you can write about to gain links yourself.

3. Use Delicious tags to keep you informed of promising new websites

Delicious can also keep you informed of new websites that could be good candidates for linking possibilities. Let's say I am building links for a web 2.0 banking application site. Delicious can keep me up-to-date automatically when someone categorizes a webpage with the tags "web 2.0" and "banking".

First, I check the Delicious bookmarks for sites by tag (delicious.com/tag/). I enter the tag "banking" (http://delicious.com/tag/banking). Now I look over to the right side under "Related Tags" to see if there is one named "web 2.0". If not, I enter a second tag, "web 2.0", which now gives me a combined tag (http://delicious.com/tag/banking+web2.0).

To take it one step further, let's add the word "list", resulting in this URL: http://delicious.com/tag/banking+web2.0+list

Now I subscribe to an RSS feed that will notify me any time a new site is tagged as "banking", "web2.0", and "list". If one appears, I can review it to see if there is a link building opportunity. At the very least I could comment on blog posts in order to get on the radar of the blogger.

Using this technique I found a post on Mashable.com, "40+ Resources for Managing Your Money Online," that hadn't been updated since 2007.

• Blog idea. If I were a blogger, I could write a blog post about the most innovative banking 2.0 sites of 2009.
• Get on the radar. I would also make sure that this author on Mashable knows about my client's new web 2.0 banking application via comments to the blog, so that, in the event the blogger updates this piece, she may have seen my client's site.

4. Use Delicious to find "librarians" and bloggers on a topic

As I was traversing the Delicious universe, I found a Delicious user who had tags in many specific areas. On the right side of the screen I saw seven "Tag Bundles," some with more than 100 tagged items. This is what I refer to as a "Delicious librarian," someone who indexes a ton of content on a specific narrow topic. These people are great to follow, since they will help you learn what is hot in a given area.

Here's a way to find lists of bloggers in your space that you can make a pitch to. In this instance I used "fashion", but feel free to insert your industry:

• http://delicious.com/tag/fashion+blog+list or
• http://delicious.com/tag/fashion+bloggers

Both of these samples illustrate the kind of tags you want to subscribe to so that content with these tags show up automatically on your radar.

We've looked at several ways Delicious can help spark link building ideas. Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge to help you find places to get links or inspire you to build content that will attract links. What a Delicious approach to link building this can be!