If you publish regularly to your website and have built up a backlog of articles, you have a valuable resource waiting to be plundered for links.

When you add a new article to your site you want it to build up some presence quickly. You probably post it to the homepage, maybe mention in on your blog (unless homepage and blog are one and the same) and it probably goes in the sidebar navigation somewhere too.

Indeed in the writing process for the article you’ve probably thought about other articles on your site and linked out to them from the new article. You then publish the article and hope that it gets listed quickly. You might even submit to Digg and Stumbleupon to get some traffic to it.

The next and crucial part is often missed though. It’s time to go through your backlog of articles on your site. They’re already indexed and getting spidered regularly (hopefully). Search through the body content of these articles for any references that could be linked to the new page, and link them up. Indeed, if it’s close enough but doesn’t quite meet your criteria, make up an extra sentence or paragraph to include your preferred keywords for the new page and link them up. Do this in a sympathetic way though, only picking the pages that are most relevant rather than adding keywords to every page of your site.

It’s not a complicated thing to do this and it shouldn’t take long in most cases but it will help with SEO and with getting your new articles the kudos they deserve.

Lets face it, if you’re just running a standard e-commerce site and it does nothing but sell products that other people sell too then you don’t have much hope of ever getting anyone to link to you. Ever.

So how does a shop set about creating content that people will link to? It varies depending on what you are selling but in general you are looking to solve a problem for people, break news to people, or entertain people.

Most ecommerce stores aren’t setup with an easy publishing platform for adding information other than new products. That’s not a biggie, you can simply ask your web developer to add pages as and when you create the content. In my view it is preferable though if you can quickly add your content yourself (and edit it as required). Adding a blog is probably the best way of doing this. It allows easy publishing, editing, conversation with readers/customers and automatic RSS feeds so people can subscribe to your other updates after they have found you via your linkbait.

So once you’re all set up and ready to publish, what could you put on there that will act as linkbait? Here’s a few ideas.

• Video of someone using one of your products to solve a common problem
• Photos of your products being used in an unusual way
• Top (& Bottom) 10 articles (not talking about your own products, but the 10 best… helps create discussion)
• Innovative competition
• Post a strong opinion on something controversial related to your marketplace
• Break a piece of news before anyone else

Most of these ideas could relate to any website. Where you need to make it work for your ecommerce site is to subtly encourage visitors to the linkbait to move through your site and buy the products. If you are blatantly selling the related product right there on the linkbait page you’ll probably get a lot less links. If you don’t cross sell at all though then you risk visitors bouncing back where they came from without exploring your site.

In my opinion the best way to cross sell on a linkbait page is to utilise your site-wide nav bars and highlight products within them. You can also add a link at the end of the article or after the linkbait to a related item in your shop, but don’t make it completely “in your face”. I certainly wouldn’t advocate putting your products, or links to your products right there in the middle of the article.

Of course, once you’ve got the linkbait there on your site you’ve got to get the message out there to movers and shakers who will get the ball rolling for you. That’s a whole different discussion.

Then when it doesn’t work first time you need to go back and do it all over again, and again until you hit just the right formula.

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Given that the main thrust of most SEO strategies is to get people linking to your website, have you asked yourself what your site has that makes it worth linking to?

There are ways to get links to sites that are not worth linking to but to be honest, most of those are links that are not worth pursuing. They tend to come from pages with zero pagerank or have nofollow applied and are basically links that Google will not count. If your site doesn’t contain something worth linking to and you chuck money or energy at a link building campaign then you’ll be mostly wasting that money and time.

So what can you do to make your site linkable? It’s kind of like the question that a lot of business startups need to ask themselves. What is my unique selling point, what makes me different and what makes me stand out enough that customers will beat a path to my door? What can you give people on your site that no-one else can?

To answer this you need to know your niche pretty well and then get inventive. If there are a hundred other sites selling exactly the same product as you, you need to visit each of them and identify something that your customer needs that none of your competitors are doing. That might be something like producing videos of how to use that product, really in-depth reviews, buyers guides, repair videos, a gallery of the product being used in unusual ways… It’s not for me to make the suggestion, it’s up to you to find something that makes your site stand out amongst all the others. Once you’ve got that unique idea, and you’ve implemented it, then we’ve got something to promote.

The more useful, funny or different your unique your idea is, then the easier it is to get links to your site. With a few reviews of a product you might be able to get a few sites to link to yours. With an all-singing, all-dancing, fireworks loaded, cabaret spectaular that people can relate to, really use, or email to their mates because it’s just too funny then you’ve got what is needed to start promoting your site.

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I keep hearing people saying link swapping is dead but then the next breath they say you should publish content that has links in it pointing to prominent bloggers/publishers sites in the hope that they’ll read it and respond or mention your article on their own site. If that’s not a link swap then I’m not sure what is.

The same people are running around saying not to waste time on useless directories as the links from them won’t count. Now that is a good piece of advice, but lets examine how link swapping used to be performed.

The majority of link swap requests I used to get were from automated systems, churning out thousands of requests in the throw enough mud and some will stick mindset. The link you got from them would be buried in some obscure corner of their site, usually in a directory format and (Google Toolbar) pagerank would be non-existent. Similarly if you responded to these requests you ended up pretty much building your own directory full of crappy links. Google wasn’t keen on bothering counting all these useless links pages and thankfully the process is dying out a bit.

So what’s the difference now. Well now you are still swapping links, but by doing it in a well thought out manner and adding the links in an appropriate piece of content. The link to the other site is contextual. It means something and it must be there to illustrate the subject of the content. When the other person reads your page and responds in an equally well thought out manner, then their link must be worth something too.

Sure, it takes more work, building relationships, writing content, baiting bloggers, but in the end it is still just a link swap.

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Google’s been lashing out at people selling links recently. In my view they’re acting like a stroppy child. Google are the one’s that changed the rules to make reciprocal linking worth less, and so the next natural progression is for people to start selling one-way-links to people who are willing to pay for them. Now they want you to put nofollow attributes on any links that you sell from your site or you’ll get penalised.

But what’s so wrong about selling links, and didn’t Google already have enough in their algorithm to stop abuse of it with out having to put up a “Grass your competitors” form up.

Presumably if people are willing to pay for a link from a site then it’s going to be a pretty high quality site. In all likelyhood that site is also going to be in a field that is related to the subject of their own site or the link would be less useful. The site owner who’s selling the link is also going to want to keep his outgoing links going to related quality sites so he doesn’t suffer a “bad neighbourhood linking” penalty. If he starts linking to adult and gambling sites then he can expect to get hammered for it anyway under existing algorithms. So he’s not going to start selling links to crappy sites. If he does then he’ll be penalised anyway.

So why are Google adding this extra layer of complexity? It’s like the government wasting time and money making up new laws for political gains when breach of the peace would have worked to nail the offender anyway. Google made up the algorithm and it works fine without penalising people for making a few quid from selling links.

You hear about linkbait all the time. It’s just providing something that people want to link to on your website. Today I saw the perfect example of linkbait. Can you blend an iPhone?. It might be a fairly extreme form of linkbait but I bet you it gets thousands of inbound links literally overnight. Brilliant.

I’ve posted an article about giving away products in return for inbound links. Might be worth a read if you have any products that you can give away.

I’ve heard it said that forum signatures are weak and worthless links to pursue by other SEO’s.
While this might have some grain of truth in pagerank terms, it couldn’t be further from the truth in simple referral traffic.
If you participate in a busy forum, closely related to the subject of your website then a signature link is almost guaranteed to drive traffic to your website. I run a holidays in Scotland website. I’m also a member of a travel forum. I watch out for any new threads related to Scotland and post on them. Chances are the people interested in those threads will be interested in my site and follow my signature link.

Using a humorous sig link can also help drive traffic from even an unrelated site. My friends run a Food and Drink website. One of their buddies stuck “F*** Jamie Oliver, this is ‘Propah’ food” in his signature on football and other forums he uses and drove loads of traffic to the site before it had even been picked up by search engines.

So don’t give up on forum sig’s. They still carry plenty power.

I read this brilliant article this morning on the ins and outs of link baiting.
For those not so deeply immersed in SEO, link baiting is the process of offering content, products or services that makes people link to your website in a viral marketing fashion.

DaveN, a man who’s blog I really admire has a post on why not to use sitemaps. To be honest, I agree with him. Build an accessible site with good internal links and you won’t need one. Build a site with poor internal linking and rely on a sitemap and Google will see the pages as having little worth and probably chuck em in the supplementals. If you can’t be arsed to link your pages together properly on your site, why should a search engine bother giving any credence to the content of those pages.