Build Links with Badges & Brand Advocates. Where are your badges?
If your response to that question is “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!” Then you are missing one of the standard plays in any link builders playbook. Badges Are Back in a Big Way You know how retro things always circle back and become trendy again? The escalated socialization of the web via services like twitter, facebook, etc. have created a vast playground for your brand advocates. The interaction that you have with your brand advocates through these channels has allowed you to continue to strengthen their affinity to your products, service, etc. and now it is time to cash in on these relationships.
Positioning is Important Just because you have built badges doesn’t mean anyone will actually place them on their website. Erm, how do I do that? What the badge actually says is just as important to the adoption as how you “sell” the badge to your advocates. Work for and with Early Adopters. Passive Link Building - Site Badges. Site badges are images hosted on your own server that come with pre-made markup for your fans to use on their own sites that link back to you.
Site badges are most successful on sites where your fans or users have incentive to link to your site. For example, users have incentive to link to their own profiles on twitter.com, because they are promoting themselves and thus creating a link to the domain. This is probably the most hands-off link building strategy you can use. It takes a few hours for proper setup, but then becomes a passive way to get links to your site. If it’s done right and easy to find on your site, can get you a lot of high quality links over time. 3 important steps in creating site badges: Designing the BadgesHtml Text AreasJavascript One Click Designing the Badges When designing the badges, think about your user base.
Are your users already immersed in all of the major social media sites? HTML Text Areas Example text area: Type your badge’s html here Javascript One Click. Using Badges for Link Building: How We Increased Traffic by 905% Effective link building strategies are one of the most tightly kept secrets amongst SEOs.
However, most link building isn’t brain surgery. It’s analyzing the niche, determining the content that relevant websites in that niche like to consume, and creating great content to market to them. Add in a healthy dose of ego appeal, and you have a recipe for success. Recently, we finished an SEO campaign for a business in the very competitive niche of distance learning. When we begin an SEO campaign, we always begin with the end-game in mind. When linkbuilding, it is essential to consider a few elements: What type of content do people in your niche like to consume?
When you can combine all three elements, you have a recipe for success. As you can see in the top image, our overall SEO strategy helped give a 905% increase in search engine traffic year over year. And below is an image of month by month traffic: As you can see, the traffic really started to climb July through September. 1. 2. Etc.