Promoting your site with links
A few years ago, sites were promoted like this. Create a site on the knee in an evening. At the exchange purchased a few thousand links and done! The site appears at the top of search results. All in good condition.
And in 2012, Google released the “Penguin. This is an algorithm that to this day fights link spam and punishes those who abuse links to promote their site.
Since that time, there has been a fundamental change in the world of SEO. If your SEO used to have links, links and more links in his expense report, today, copywriting occupies a large item of expenditure there. There has been a shift in focus from link promotion to promotion through useful content.
Does this mean that link promotion is “dead”? Not at all! It became more refined and much more effective, although the time costs for this kind of promotion have increased.
In this article how to get links for free and many more interesting things.
Why we need links
Maybe you don’t need to buy them at all or even get them for free? Let’s find out if we need links to promote the site.
Working with links belongs to the section of external optimization. This work is carried out after the structure is elaborated, created a quality content, created a cross reference within the site. That is, the external promotion of the site begins only when the site is fully ready.
Links are needed for the search engine to promote you in search results. It works like this: you have created a new site for the sale of used cars. And decided to blog about the intricacies of choosing a car. And then, purely by chance, the editor of the online magazine “Behind the Wheel” comes to your site. He likes your content, and will release his article on the choice of used cars. And at the end, he will put a link to your site, saying that these guys know a lot about the subject.
That’s how your site will get a link from a quality, well visited resource. The next time search engine crawlers will analyze your site, they will find that you were referred to such a reputable source. For them, this will mean that your site has become interesting, which means it needs to move up in search. As a result, links solve the following problems:
- increase the authority (trust) of the site;
- affect the ranking of the site in search engines;
- attract the attention of new users (referral traffic);
- Increase recognition of the site.
Great, we managed to explain why links are important and even gave an example. It’s time to move on to the next big section. Now we’re going to find out where to get link mass.
Ways to get links
Without being sly, we can divide the methods into paid and free. In this case, free does not mean – not effective. On the contrary, the flow of traffic from free sources may be even more targeted than paid. Therefore, we will talk to you first about the free ways to get links.
How to get free links
To get free traffic, you need to learn how to post your own ads or comments on various internet sites. Here are a few of the most effective options:
- Commenting on blogs. You can leave comments on blogs that are somehow related to your topic. Help their inhabitants with something. And there are two ways to get traffic.
The first is to leave a link to your site directly in the comments. There is a chance that such posts will be quickly removed by the moderators. But if you will be an active participant in the comments, you can get away with it.
The second – the transition to your site when you click on your forum avatar. Not all forums, but many of the major forums are able to make when you register so that when you click on your avatar user was redirected to your resource.
Most often, such blogs give “closed links”. This means that such links do not transfer the “weight” of the site to you. But, they are still considered by search engines.
- Guest material. This method will work only if you are very familiar with the subject. If you are versed in car repairs, then offer the owner of the site on similar subjects to write an interesting material for him. And ask at the end of the article to put a link or disclaimer, they say, written by the owner of such-and-such a site.
This method is popular with bloggers, but nothing prevents you from trying your hand with other professionals.
- Open sites. Or as they are also called, web 2.0 media. Today there are many more such sites than 10 or 20. Therefore it is recommended to analyze the audience. So the resource vc.ru is mostly visited by workers in Internet marketing, the financial sector, high technology and others. And Ya.Zen – platform from the search engine Yandex in the core of the audience has people in their teens, women in their 30s to 45s and simply fans of entertainment content and political news.
Such open sources include Habrahabr, Ya.Zen, Pikabu, vc.ru, KakProsto.ru and others. Anyone can register an account on the site and start writing posts. They should not be blatantly advertising. If you decide to just praise your project, your post will be quickly deleted, and you yourself will be banned (but that’s not certain). To promote through these sources, you need to give the highest quality content and not abuse advertising messages. Basically, such services give all the same “closed” links. But, it will not be bad for you.
- Social media. Search engines are increasingly taking into account links from social networks. It is best if you create a group or page. They are well indexed by search engines and you will get traffic to your site from them. You can also post links in other people’s groups, offering them content.
You can be placed for a fee or free – here already as agreed. But, mostly, administrators are interested in interesting content. Important thing to say – do not overdo it. Do not go after the “open” links. At the first stages of life of the site, their excessive use may lead to falling under sanctions. Yes, “closed” links do not add weight to the site, but if you leave them in places with a lot of traffic, the flow of visitors to your site is ensured. People will come to you, and if the site is done well, you will have behavioral factors – the most important of SEO factors – working for you.
Paid methods of gaining link mass
How and where to buy eternal links to promote your site, we now tell.
- Link exchanges. We think that you have heard of at least one. Reviews for a few large and credible resources, we will present below, but about how they work now.
At the exchangers everything is very simple. You register, find suitable sites and negotiate with the administration about the conditions of placement. You can buy both eternal and “rental” links. But, the latter method is not recommended. The most effective method – buying eternal links.
- An interesting method is buying crowd – driven links. Specially trained professionals for a small fee will place your links as natively as possible (with integration into the accommodation environment). Placing is carried out on a variety of sites: social networks, some sites with questions, in the comments on thematic information portals, etc.Usually, the links created in this way are closed (nofollow), but you already know that for search engine it does not play a role.
- Sites and blogs. Here everything is much more complicated, because you will have to manually contact each owner of the selected resource. The price of such placements is higher and depends only on the blogger’s wishes, but the value increases proportionally. All you have to do is to choose a blogger with quality content and without an overabundance of advertising material.
Proper purchase of links to promote the site
We have already mentioned that if you abuse link promotion, you will be sanctioned, excluding your site from the search engine. Moreover, not only your site but also the donor site may suffer. He may suffer because of too active placement of links.
The main recommendations that can be given when buying links, as follows:
- Buy links only from quality resources that correspond to your theme. Often seen a method of promotion, when webmasters bought packs of links from adult resources (the cheapest links and you can always buy a lot of them in one place). Needless to say, that the quality of such links is extremely low.
- Have a sense of proportion. Today it is not the quantity but the quality of links that matters. It is better if you buy 15-20 links on quality resources, than thousands of links on the “trash” of the Internet.
- Create quality content. Buying links by itself makes no sense if people will come to your site and leave without finding what they are looking for. So by publishing new content and improving old content, you will be improving behavioral factors – the most important factors in ranking.
You need to understand the difference between buying links and advertising. If someone writes an article about you and inserts an “open” link in it, it won’t hurt you. Yandex and Google will treat it loyally. But if the Internet will appear in the hundreds of such articles at once, the search robot will not be so kind and you will have problems.
Recommendations for evaluating sites
It is very important to approach responsibly to the choice of sites for placement of your links. If someone will write an article about you, there is nothing to help). But if you choose where to place, we can help you with recommendations:
- Daily attendance and audience quality. We recommend that you pay attention to sites with a daily attendance of 500-1000 people. Otherwise, too little traffic. Use SimilarWeb tool to make a check.
- Subject matter. We have already said that you should choose sites of your subject. This should be done because you are guaranteed to get in your target audience and search engines do not have a “question” about the appearance of references. In the future, you can expand the subjects.
- Trustworthiness. In other words – the quality of links to the donor site. Quality created yesterday and the landing page that existed for several years is different. To assess this parameter you can directly on the exchanger – there are usually placed such data on the sites. Choose proven donors.
- Spamming. Keep an eye on how many links your potential donor places, and what their quality. If the number of links exceeds the limit – it is not good. This criterion should be looked at in isolation from all others. Completely different situations where a site with thousands of pages, referring to hundreds of sites, and when a single page is simply stuffed with links.
- The volume of text. If a site publishes a short (up to 1000 characters), then the prosperity of such a site will not be. For search engines is optimal when the amount of text from 2500-3000 characters.
- The cost of the link. If you are not buying links through exchangers, but through personal contact with the owner of the pricing is not limited, so you should assess the adequacy of the price.
- Other parameters. Frequency of updates, engagement, the number of ads, stability and other.