Congratulations! You Just Launched a Successful Link Campaign

Ask just about anybody who does their own search engine optimization what their least favorite task is and they’ll more than likely respond with “link building”. It’’s one of those things that is so simple yet so mundane and time consuming that we often neglect our link building for almost any excuse. It’s probably safe to say that a lack of quality inbound links is one of the main reasons many Websites are not ranking for those valuable search terms.

But let’s forget about link building for now and go to our analytics for a look at our Website referrals. Unless your Website has been neglected from day one of the launch, its referring sites will naturally increase over time. And if you pay any attention to your analytics you’ll become very familiar with the referring sites and recognize which ones are a benefit to your site and which are not. And you should be able to recall how you acquired those referring sites. 

The Types of Websites I see in my Website referrals.
I have a niche camping blog that gets a small number of Website referral visitors from Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon and several other social and bookmarking sites. I really don’t get much benefit from these referring sites except some Website awareness and occasional AdSense revenue, and maybe a tiny bit of link juice.

Also when I look at the referrals I see referrals from images.google and other search engines ranging from Bing, Ask, Dogpile, Websearch.verizon.net and Mysearch.com. I don’t see any benefit from these referrals but I have worked on Websites that received sales conversions from images.google, so these referring sites can result in a some benefit to the right Website. 

Then there are the referring sites that are responsible for most of my Website referral traffic. They are similar to my Website and result in occasional revenue, but best of all they are passing link juice. These are the type of referring sites we want to build on.

What Websites are these?
They are all directly related to the theme of my Website, the outdoor recreation industry. And they all have decent to excellent search engine rankings, and they all pass link authority to my Website. And the referrals are consistent and they all offer opportunity for increased referrals.

How did I get these referrals? Through my interaction with the Website.
A few I’ve emailed with information regarding my Website and they eventually used the information in a blog post. One of my top referring Websites is a popular blog where I occasionally guest blog for the fun of it, so the qualified referrals and link juice come pretty easy. Another referring Website is a forum that I participate on regularly and receive qualified visitors to my Website through my forum signature. There’s not a lot of link juice passing through here but it’s easy enough. 

Okay, so I’ve increased my referring sites by 200% since December 2008 by doing the simple things I mentioned above. But the question is how do I increase it another 200% by December 2009? Now we know that not all referring Websites will benefit our Website, so we need to place our focus on the few that will benefit us, and we will use the same techniques that have worked for us in the past.

• Increased guest blog posts will increase my opportunity to link to my own Website. I will also seek out new blogs to guest post on.
• I will keep sending those request emails to select Websites. It’s a real pain but is worth spending an hour or two each month – or maybe every other month.
• Bloggers always need subject matter so I will step up my effort of sending out information regarding my Website. One of my favorite techniques is to email a carefully crafted Word document or PDF with a brief summary of  news or event that bloggers can easily rewrite into their own blog. And by providing  images the blogger will see an opportunity to produce a quality blog post with little effort, just be sure to write your Website into the story, otherwise you may not get the credit. Do this several times and you’ll eventually establish relationships with bloggers who will accept your information of a regular basis.

So with the few things I mentioned in this blog post you can increase your Website referrals, and once you see how easy it is you might say to yourself, “Congratulations! You Just Launched a Successful Link Campaign”.