The Low Hanging Fruit of Link Building

Vinny La Barbera
Written by

Vinny La Barbera

Have you just launched a new website that needs to build its online authority? Does your existing website a strong, diversified link portfolio to help it compete in the organic results?

If you are nodding your head to either of these questions, then a link building strategy needs to find its way into your marketing plan.

Fortunately for you, there are some quick and easy ways to build links to get you started – referred to as the low hanging fruit of link building.

Low Hanging Fruit of Link Building

Are “Easy” Links Even Valuable?

Before you go getting all excited about building some links quickly and easily, there’s something you need to understand…

Best Types of Links

Just because we are going to provide some low hanging fruit doesn’t mean that your link building efforts should stop there. To make your website competitive online – and to get useful traffic from your links – you need to incorporate a diversified link building strategy.

Are we saying that the low hanging fruit is not going to help much?

Definitely not.

What we’re saying is that you should not expect to rely on the low hanging fruit as you’re only source of backlinks as they will merely be a start for your website – and probably not incredibly effective on their own.

Coupling them with stronger links (like editorial links from authoritative websites) will strengthen your link profile, but let’s focus on the easy stuff first.


Easily Attainable Links and How to Get Them

Collecting Easy Links

A comprehensive, effective SEO strategy has to include link building. More specifically, link building that brings a diverse set of quality backlinks that will accomplish any or all of the following objectives:

  • Drive relevant, useful traffic
  • Establish credibility and popularity for your website / blog
  • Contribute to an increase in web leads or online sales

Link profiles made up of all different types of links from varying sources tend to help websites realize these results sooner than later.

This even includes easily attainable links that may not carry the same value as higher quality, more authoritative links.

Here are the varying types of “low hanging” links and how to get them

5 Types of Effective “Easy” Links to Grab

Web Asset Links

Don’t overlook the link opportunities you may have available to you right under your nose. In other words, if your company has other websites or blogs, then consider cross-link strategy between them by using backlinks on deep, internal pages of each asset.

Web Asset Links
Image courtesy of Stigmatter

Benefits:

  • Keeps visitors within your owned / managed web properties
  • Passes established link authority to newer, weaker web pages

Examples:

  • Blog post linked to marketing site landing page or about page
  • Marketing site landing page linked to a relevant blog article / quote

Tips:

  • Don’t link keywords in your blog posts or website pages to one another just for the sake of link building
  • Place links that make sense and that provide your visitors with a good experience

 

Social Profile Links

Although most social profile links are “no follow” links they can still provide some value and shouldn’t be ignored, especially since they are simple to get.

Social Profile Links
Image courtesy of Knowem

Benefits:

  • Prevents others from using your brand / company name
  • Creates a more natural mix of “do follow” and “no follow” links

Examples:

Tips:

  • Use a service like Knowem or NameChk to get help finding and creating these profiles
  • Don’t create duplicate profiles (management of these will drive you crazy)
  • Try to individualize / customize the more popular profiles in the instance that someone may actually come across them
  • Cross-link these profiles to one another

 

Local Business Listing Links

Much like social profile links, local business listing links are not going to provide much in terms of direct SEO value to your website. However, their other benefits make them necessary for any link profile especially with the increasing importance of having a strong local search presence.

Local Business Listing Links
Image courtesy of Yext

Benefits:

  • Drives relevant, qualified traffic to your website
  • Adds credibility to your business (assuming you have a good website) to visitors researching your products / services
  • Listings can rank alongside your website in search results

Examples:

Tips:

  • Use a service like Yext or GetListed to find and complete your local listings
  • Add some unique information to each (as opposed to using the same company bio for example across multiple ones) so that each particular listing is tailored to the audience of the listings’ website.
  • Use as many photos as you’re allowed (people love photos)

 

Press Release Links

Despite some rumblings that press releases have become useless for SEO, specifically link building, there remain to be some valid reasons to continue using press releases for links.

Press Release Links
Image courtesy of PRWeb

Benefits:

  • Drives traffic to the referenced website / blog
  • Increases important brand mentions in the search engines
  • Can help very long-tailed phrases to get indexed and ranked quickly in Google News

Examples:

Tips:

  • Don’t put out a press release every week, reserve them for something that’s actually newsworthy
  • Stick with just 1 link for every 100 words in each press release
  • Make the press release as factual and objective as possible to encourage sharing and linking from those that see it

 

Social Share / Mention Links

Although not your conventional backlink, a link to a page or post on your site that gets shared via social media can be very beneficial for your website. On top of a few primary benefits, these shares are becoming even more valuable as they act as signals to the search engines that your content is popular or authoritative.

Social Sharing Links
Image courtesy of Searchmetrics

Benefits:

Examples:

  • Facebook Likes, Shares and Comments
  • Twitter Tweets, Retweets and Favorites
  • Google Plus +1’s and Shares
  • LinkedIn Shares
  • Pinterest Pins and Repins
  • YouTube Likes and Comments

Tips:

  • Make your content easy to share for your visitors by using social media action buttons (not profile links)
  • Implement Open Graph and Structured Data throughout your website to control how your content is previewed when it is shared
  • Engage your social media followers to encourage more sharing

Leave a comment

Did we miss any “easy” links that you’ve found to be effective?

If so, then please share with everyone (including us) by leaving a COMMENT BELOW.


Easy Link Building Can Be Effective, but It’s Not Enough

It wouldn’t be right to close out this article without reiterating the fact that the 5 easy types of links outlined above are not enough to help your website compete online.

Link Building Pyramid
Image courtesy of Business Marketing Blog

They will help to build and diversify your website’s link profile, and may even bring some traffic increases, but you shouldn’t expect your website to grab that #1 spot in Google or Bing anytime soon with just these links.

Instead you should always be thinking about how to attain links that will build your authority, bring more traffic and lead to more conversions.

Expand your link building efforts to mix in these types of higher quality links for the best results:

  • Editorial links
  • .edu and .gov links
  • Deep anchor text, brand and non-anchor text links from relevant articles

If you’re not sure how or where to get these types of links, then we’d love to help.

Go ahead and hit the button below to schedule a consultation with one of our link building strategists to learn what strategy may be best for your business.

 

Need help starting or improving your link building strategy?

LEARN HOW TO GET MORE LINKS

Categories: Link Building

5 Comments

    June 7, 2013

    Nice summary. I absolutely agree. In order to execute successfully, you have to learn the basics first!

    July 1, 2013

    Hi. I’ve heard that these blanket approaches to social bookmarking and local directory submissions don’t really help that much, and in fact can hurt your seo by seeming “spammy.” Any thoughts/updates?
    Thanks,
    -H

    July 1, 2013

    Thanks for reading our post Hudson.

    What you’ve heard definitely holds some validity. This is exactly why we have these tactics described as “low hanging”. We also stated that things like locking up social bookmarking profiles and even niche local directories are usually good for a few reasons other than just link building.

    If you’re expecting any of these things to deliver big SEO or traffic wins in the short term (or even the long term in most cases), then you’d be disappointed of course.

    These things are really just easy things to grab, in moderation, and lock up for your brand name. The second someone starts abusing these things, then they can most definitely come off as spammy tactics.

    Hope that helps a bit.

    December 7, 2013

    Nice work Vinny, I do believe that Press Releases are still worth to work on even though Matt Cutts said that the links pass no value, but still from what I’ve heard and seen so far it doesn’t seem to be 100% true, as long as we keep ’em clean and really making them news worthy.

    January 25, 2015

    Even seasoned SEOs still don’t seem to get it: there is one over arching thing Google tries to excel at: the best ONE search result for the user’s search question. If they could ascertain that, then most results (SERPs) would contain one or ten links at the most. So when Cutts says guest posting is dead he means those posts that were done to game the SERPs. So they want to get a higher listing in the SERPs than -based on their content answering Google’s most pressing question above- they deserve. And Google then tries to purge that erroneous result from the list and “restore” order. This leads to algorithm changes that then end in a lot of “stranded investments” in time and money in “obsolete” link building and other SEO activities. But we can all see, where Google is headed: finding that elusive ONE (or few) answer(s) to the searchers’ questions. If we don’t bother at all (!) about SEO in the dated sense but focus only (!) on the content, we might not get quick results but.… if my reasoning is right, like with Shakespeare who prevails where hundreds of his contemporary “competitors” have waned into oblivion, you will see your OLD content rise a little in rankings each time Google closed another SEO “loophole”…

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