Most people involved in SEO are
familiar with primary link sources such as directories, press release websites,
blogs, forums, article syndication websites, social networks and bookmarking
portals. However, as part of your link building, consider the following alternative
sources that can provide you with much needed link juice:
Customized 404 Pages
Just be sure that missing pages on
your website are not impacting inbound link numbers. If someone links to your
website and they get a 404 error, you may be missing out on potential incoming
links. Be sure to address this problem. If you have your own custom 404 error pages,
do a crawl test (available in Google Webmaster Tools) to identify broken links
and put in place permanent 301 redirects to appropriate pages on your website.
Oh, and do test the links individually after you implement the 301 redirects.
Testimonials
It may be worth contacting some
website whose products & services you use and discuss the
possibility of
you providing them with a testimonial in order to get an inbound link
from
them. This may take a bit of work but the results are well worth it,
especially
if you can get a link from a highly ranked website.
Wiki’s
Apart from Wikipedia, there are a
large number of other Wiki’s that cover a very large number of topics. Links
from Wikis are beneficial and generally tend to be in-content external links that
appear within the body of an article, or content. Search Engines assign a high
value to such links despite the fact that some of them place “nofollow”
attributes. Some examples: Google’ sKnol and AboutUs.org.
Free Press Release Websites
SEO experts are familiar with
PRWeb.com. However, there are several other free press release distribution
websites that can provide you with high value links. Some of them don’t allow
the creation of anchor text links but these websites are indexed and do appear
in search engine result pages. Some examples are 24-7PressRelease.com,
PRlog.org and PR.com.
Social Network Profiles and Pages
A lot of social media websites
allow you to create custom profiles using your name, or that of your
business.
Take advantage of this. Do remember that idle social media profiles can
do more
damage than good so be sure to do periodic updates. The frequency of the
updates will depend on you business and on your service and/or product
and
industry.
.edu pages
Links from educational
organizations are highly trusted by search engines. Although difficult to
obtain, you can create a profile on your educational organization’s alumni
section, or you can create a profile on a sorority, fraternity or educational
related volunteer website that may be linked to your alma mater.