Linking Strategies

E-Mail + Social Bookmarking = Instant Rankings Dr. Ralph F. Wilson , Web Marketing Today - Jan 26, 2010

Getting links is one of the most difficult tasks in search engine optimization. It's a slow, tedious, never-ending process. Here's an approach to linking that can rapidly boost your rankings for selected landing pages -- if you have an e-mail newsletter or a group of people who read your blog regularly.

 

In a nutshell the technique is this. E-mail your list about a new article, product, or service. Specifically ask them to bookmark the webpage using AddThis.com, a gadget that makes it easy for people to bookmark using their favorite social bookmarking service. If you provide valuable content to loyal readers, you'll get a number of social bookmarking links to your webpage -- using your own selected anchor keywords. These targeted links add up to higher PageRank for your landing pages.

Let me break this down into its elements.

Develop an E-Mail Newsletter List or Blog Following

The key to this strategy is to develop loyal e-mail newsletter or blog post readers. This has three parts:

1. Get subscriptions, either to an e-mail newsletter or subscriptions to an RSS feed for your blog. To achieve this well you'll need to make getting subscriptions one of the highest priorities of your site. Display a subscription form on every page. Provide readers a rationale why subscribing is in their best interest. Offer incentives to subscribe. Don't be shy. Get the subscription.
2. Offer great content. Once you've obtained a subscription, then offer great content to your readers on a regular basis. This is a lot of work, but your readers will appreciate it. So much that is written online is just fluff -- and fluff doesn't produce loyalty. But if you offer solid content time after time, your followers will continue to read your newsletter or blog each time you post a new issue.
3. Write personably. One of the keys is to build a personal relationship with your readers. If you write with a dry, third-person, corporate-speak style, no one will care. Rather, write conversationally -- though not sloppily. Share something of yourself -- but without wasting your readers' time. Share personal anecdotes that help you make your point. I try to obtain my subscribers' first name, so every newsletter addresses them personally, by name. If your readers get to know you -- and you offer them great content -- they'll become personally loyal.

Ask for the Bookmark

The second prong of this strategy is to deliberately ask people to bookmark an article or landing page. I used to ask people to link to a webpage, with only limited success. Few people control a website or blog that enables them to link easily. But everyone can use social bookmarks -- and many or most social bookmarks constitute a link to your site. Google trolls social bookmarking pages to see what users find valuable. Those bookmarks act as votes for your site. Those links to your webpage add up.

My tool of choice for this is AddThis.com. You can set up a free account with them. They supply you a bit of JavaScript encoded with your account number that shows up as a button when you paste it on your webpage. The JavaScript automatically grabs the title and URL of the webpage. When someone clicks on the button, it takes them to an intermediate page showing dozens of social bookmark logos. Your reader picks his or her favorite -- mine is Delicious -- and clicks on it. Now she's taken to the social bookmarking site. The title and URL fields of the bookmark are already filled in. Your readers saves the bookmark, perhaps adding comments or a few tags, and she's done. And you have a link!

I've taken this two steps further. When I ask my newsletter readers to bookmark a particular page:

1. I include the button in my e-mail newsletter, with the appropriate URL and title fields already filled in.
2. I also include a button at the top of the landing page -- and ask them again to bookmark the page.

My reader have been asked twice. Since many have become loyal, they'll often do as I ask.

Of course, if a reader chooses the "Favorites" option on their web browser, I won't get a link. But most will select a bookmarking service, such as Google Bookmarks or Delicious. Incidentally, AddThis statistics will indicate the number of bookmarks for each bookmarking service.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

Because you can control the title in the AddThis button, you also have control over the keywords associated with the resulting social bookmarking links. Construct these titles carefully, making sure to include the specific keywords that will draw the right people to this landing page in the future. With many linking strategies, you don't have much control over the anchor text of the link. But with AddThis you do. Dig into the HTML of the AddThis button and you'll see how it works.

An Real Life Example

As well as being an Internet marketing publisher, I'm also a minister. For years I've taught online Bible studies via e-mail. My Joyful Heart Newsletter (www.joyfulheart.com) has about 32,000 double opt-in subscribers. In December, I sent out a newsletter encouraging people to subscribe to my newest Bible study, The Life of Jacob (www.jesuswalk.com/jacob/), which began January 15 with about 3,200 participants. In both the newsletter and on the landing page I put an AddThis button specifically asking readers to bookmark the site.

Over the next few days 589 people made bookmarks for the landing page or sent e-mails to others, according to AddThis analytics. Discount those who use the web browser "Favorites" (about 8% in this sample) and I'll still have hundreds of new links to the site. According to Google Webmaster Tools, there are currently 208 links to this new site. Yes, it's better to build links slowly, the link gurus tell us, but don't reject a lot of links if you can get them quickly.

A Google search on "Life of Jacob" now places that sectional page near the top of the rankings. I've used this strategy dozen times and seen the same result again and again.

The Bottom Line

I'm not claiming that this linking strategy is easy. It's not. Building a loyal subscriber base for your newsletter or blog takes energy, time, and consistency. But if you're willing to put in the hard work, you'll find a wonderful bonanza in higher rankings for your pet projects.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson is a pioneer in Internet marketing. His free Web Marketing Today newsletter (www.wilsonweb.com) is read by more than 100,000 subscribers each week. If you subscribe, you'll also receive six free e-books and whitepapers on Internet marketing. This article first appeared in the Search Engine Strategies program for SES Chicago, December 7-10, 2009