Ask for the Link: If you have content that people will link to naturally then plant a seed in the mind of your visitors with a “link to us” button or banner. I placed one of these in the persistent navigation of one of my sites and my natural link acquisition rate increased nicely. (I plot total yahoo backlinks on the vertical axis vs time on the horizontal to track my natural link rate for total .edu .gov and .us backlinks. All three lines got distinctly steeper a few days after I installed the buttons and this steeper slope has held.) I believe that if you have really strong content that a link to us button should be on every page and in a prime location. When the button is clicked the visitor is taken to a page with a thank you message and a choice of link codes.
This Site has Everything! I don’t hesitate to put a large number of links on the homepage of my sites. I want the visitor to be impressed when they land on my homepage and get the “this site has everything” feeling. Instead of five or six neat categories in the horizontal navigation bar with dropdown menus, I like to have all of those links out in the open and clearly visible. In my opinion this can increase your natural link acquisition rate and I have hard data to confirm that it has increased the average “time-on-site” and pageviews per visitor – at least for my sites. Try it and watch your stats.
Build Content for Specific Link Requests: Some of my best success at linkbuilding has resulted from visiting authority sites in my theme and deciding what is missing from their content or missing from their collections of links to outside sites. I then build content that fills the gaps in their topic coverage and when its ready I make a specific link request. Works almost every time.
OK…. now its your turn. How about just one or two ideas?
