We have just launched our new service for finance and insurance clients which allows registered members to work co-operatively to share and spread the word about their businesses, websites and blogs in a n easy yet highly effective way.

The Finance and Insurance Social Traffic Club is aimed at helping all of our users boost exposure by cross promotion across a range of social bookmarking and Web 2.0 sites.

The club is by invitation only and you need to have finance or insurance websites to take part.  To see if you are eligible to become a member, please send an email to us via our contact form with a bit about you and your business and we will get back to you shortly.

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I probably get asked once a day for some ideas to generate inbound one way links. Rather than keep sending out the same old email I thought I would give you a list of ideas.  While not definitive, I am sure there are more than enough strategies here to boost your inbound links.

Article Submissions

Submit unique written articles to a range of article submission sites such as EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and others…

Private Network Article Submissions

Build a list of related sites that you can submit content to in return for a web link.  Use Google and Yahoo to find related sites that have or use content from other sources.   It will be more valuable to both parties if you produce something unique for each site in your network. It doesn’t take many sites or much to rejig an article a few times.

Directory Submissions

Not the 3 million sites you can submit to, but those related to your niche or that have traffic, and don’t forget the big boys, Yahoo, and Business.com.

Press Releases

Writing and sending out a press release online will get you inbound links, not all will be keyword rich but a mix of inbound links using different formats will be beneficial. Plus keyword optimised releases can get you search engine rankings.

Forum Posts

Posting useful information and taking part in forums will provide inbound links from your forum signature footer.  Just make sure you take part. No one likes a link spammer.

Blog Commenting

Like Forum posts, you can post on related blogs, but make sure what you are adding is adding value to THEIR blog, not just a link for you. And don’t worry if the link is a no follow link.  It all adds value.

Web 2.0 profiles

Having links on your Web 2.0 profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, BT Tradespace etc all add value.  Make them relevant and don’t get too carried away with the number of links.

The key to link building is three things:

• Consistency – Link building is not a one-time event, you need to work at link building as part of your marketing strategy.
• Multiple techniques – Don’t just focus on getting links for one method because it is easy.  You need to mix it up and protect yourself.  The adage “putting your eggs in one basket” can be a problem long term.
• Not getting hung up on formatting – You need to make your link building look as natural as possible so you need url links, no follow links, non keyword specific links to your site as well as multiple keyword links.  Just focusing on keyword links alone will cause you long term issues as your link profile will look unnatural.

If you don’t have the time to do this for yourself, get in touch as we can help put together a bespoke package for your needs and budget.

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You understand that you need to build links in order to drive your site up the search engines and also to drive direct traffic, but you are struggling to find out where you can get links from that are both useful land relevant to your business.

Here are a couple of ideas to get you going….

Google Alerts

Using Google alerts means you can have link building opportunities sent straight to your inbox every day by keyword! Using the “comprehensive” setting will means you will get new pages by keyword from Google search, Google News and Google Blog Search. Therefore you will have ample sources and places to investigate to drive links back by adding comments on these pages.

Bonus Tip: You can also use these as ideas for writing your own content too.

Forums

Forums are a great source of info and user generated content and taking part actively can be a great way to increase the exposure of your website and also the links to your website form your Forum footer file and your profile page. That said who has time to sit on forums all day. Well now you don’t have too as using a trick I picked up using Google Alerts, you can have new, relevant keyword based posts sent to your inbox daily too!

Instead of simply setting up Google alerts on keywords you set them up to pull in the search string of the forum url. Confused, don’t worry here’s an example:

site:www.sitepoint.com/forums/ “keyword”

Replace “keyword” with your keyword you want to return results on. You use the string above that is relevant to the forum you wish to add an alert to.

This is a great way to have forums tell you when new content / posts are added on the keywords that relate to your business.

If the thought of all that email scares you, there is a new service recently launched that will do all of this for you and search many more different options besides. You can read more about it here:  BackLinkAgent

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Building links is one of the major cornerstones of any SEO or internet marketing campaigns. Now, there are a hundred and one different ways to build links but most services out there will offer you an automated solution that sounds great because you don’t have to do anything.

And therein lays the first problem. Most automated link building solutions are not that clever and will not give you exactly what you need. Add to the fact that most of these services will leave a footprint a mile wide for anyone to see that this is not natural link building. Plus they will only tend to focus on one or two methods of linking building. If that method falls out of favour, your site will drop lower in the rankings not climb higher.

What’s the alternative?

The main alternative is to adopt some form of human intervention, which means do some of this stuff yourself or get someone to do it for you. In order to do this you need to understand that link building like most things in life is about mitigating the risk and keeping all your eggs evenly placed around lots of different baskets.

Some of the methods you can employ include:

• Article Syndication
• Press Syndication
• Directory Submissions
• Buy Links (not advised but needs to be mentioned)
• Forum Posts
• Link Exchanges
• Blog Posting
• Social Profiles
• Web 2.0
• Web Video
• Podcasting

And within each of these methods are a whole bunch of specific sub methods relevant to each one.

So as you can see there could be a lot of work here for someone to do for you.

We would suggest that you pick four or five of the above areas and start (slowly) increasing activity in these areas. Yes you can go out and “buy” hundreds if not thousands of links but why run the risk of being penalised – and on top of that link buying is against most T&Cs of the bigger search engines (not that they currently do much about it)

If you are interested in having a strategy developed for you then why not get in touch via our contact form. If however, you feel you want to take this stuff on yourself but just really need help identifying link opportunities yourself you should look at a newly launched service called BackLinkAgent. It is not an automated tool but will easily help you find relevant linking opportunities for you to exploit.

You can read more about it here: BackLinkAgent

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