An effective link building strategy

I’m a huge proponent of building links through developing great content. We’ve had tremendous success generating traffic and links for our clients using this tactic alone. But sometimes you need more.

Linking building. Yes, I hate the term as much as you do. It’s time consuming. It’s HARD. The ROI is grey. I have a hard time devoting a ton of time to it when I could be doing things that are more tangible. Especially when I’m working with a small, local business that has a limited budget.

So what I’m continually trying to do is identify tactics and SEO best practices that are easy AND return value to the client. Definitely a tall order.

Recently, I’ve taken notice of a tactic that seems to be working well for others. Here’s the guts of it.

Interesting link building strategy…

1) Make sure that your site has an RSS Feed. (WordPress does this outta the box so it’s always a good choice)

2) Create content. (Sorry this is the hard part but it’s necessary)

3) Don’t just post your article to your website. Engage in wide content distribution. Encourage scraping (submit to content repositories like alltop.com, etc.) and any other way including social media to get the content out there so people will share it or scrape (steal) your content via your RSS feed.

4) Add the following to your content. One will automatically insert a link back to your site if it’s copied and pasted. The other one automatically inserts links into your footer if the content is pulled and posted on an external site via RSS.

http://www.tynt.com/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer/

The key to this is developing a comprehensive system for distributing content. If you can do that, the links will come.

Please check back because I’ll be posting my own content distribution strategy in the near future.

Here’s to your successful (and white hat) link building in 2013!