How to Launch a Link Worthy Website

A site’s linkabiity highly depends on what it’s capable of offering to its audience – content. However, most of the time, authority and already established sites are the ones who get the most attention when it comes to link commendations.

For nearly all newly published sites, obtaining natural and content-driven editorial links is quite a challenge, given that most linkers on any industry are more likely to link or cite authority and trusted websites as sources than to new sites that haven’t proved anything yet.

There are several options and avenues for a newly launched website to survive the competition as well as to achieve faster growth in terms of natural links, brand awareness, web popularity and authoritativeness (which all eventually leads to the site’s profitability):

* Through creativity, wherein your site can offer something that can’t be found or available anywhere else (could be your site’s offered product, tool, information, services, etc…).
* Extensiveness of provided content, product or services can leverage the site’s reputation to be immediately perceived as an authority in your field.
* Time vs. budget – knowing all the steps you need can definitely overwhelm you when you start to realize how much work is needed to be implemented. Minimizing the time you spend on monotonous tasks by getting help from others, and spending your spare time to do all the big tasks (more planning) can accelerate the project’s productivity and scalability.

These options are shortcuts for sites – whether you are in a not-so-interesting niche or a highly competitive one – to be an authority, to attract its target audience and to be link worthy, since most of these are able to materialize results if done accordingly.
Preparation

Putting tasks in order prior to launching your website is imperative to running an efficient marketing campaign for your online business. It is apparent that a well-researched plan and the precision of putting those plans into effect are the most significant components to any successful business strategy you’ll find on the web. In conducting the initial stages of your site creation, it should include:

Keyword Research

* Use Google Adwords’ External Keyword Tool to find keywords or search terms fitting to your site’s content to specifically target your market through search engines.
* Choose 15 – 30 keywords for the initial stage of your SEO campaign. This stage of the research should include major or exact phrase keywords, longtails (3 – 7 words with low competition), informational (ex. “how to”, “what is”, “tips”, etc…) and actionable keywords (ex. “buy”, “cheap”, “affordable”, etc…).

Content Strategy

* Plan your important landing pages’ content such as headlines, call to actions and element placements (for homepage, services page, sales pages, product categories, etc…).
* It’s best to designate each of your targeted keyword to different pages of your site or to simply create pages that target a single keyword in particular, for them to have higher chances of ranking on SERPs, as each page will have high relevance scores for their targeted search terms.
* Research and list highly linkable content or link bait concepts that are strictly about your site’s major keywords.
* Strategize on support contents for your important landing pages. These support pages can be in a form of blog posts that link to your site’s important pages, information pages that support sales pages, or externally hosted content such as guest blog posts to pass more link juice, generate targeted traffic and to improve the visibility of your important pages.

Competitor Analysis

* Distinguish your top competitors by searching on the top ranking sites for each of your major keywords via Google search.
* Track the sites/pages linking to your competitors using Yahoo Site Explorer and observe the methods they have used to acquire those links.
* Analyze your competitors’ link profile and top pages through Open Site Explorer. Examine those pages and list the things you think are missing on those pages that you can offer on yours.
* Track the top keywords that are sending traffic to your competitors through SEMRush.
* Study their social activity and relationships through their Twitter accounts and/or blog interactions (regular commentators or the ones they mostly mention on their blog posts).

Site Structuring and Conversion Funnels

* Clean and user-friendly site navigation.
* Strategic internal linking structure.
* Removing advertisements or other distracting page elements on the site’s important landing pages or sales pages.
* Inclusion of trust indicators (such as image of the site owner(s), contact details, privacy policy page, certificate badges, etc…)

Link search and prospecting

* Create a list of link opportunities for your site by implementing a thorough link search before actually launching the site.
* Craft a template for your link request outreach that can be easily personalized.
* Make a list of the sites and/or blogs that you’ll need to socially engage with.

Visually Appealing Design

Design is a vital aspect to any form of website, as this alone is capable of generating interest to readers as well as to possible linkers. Investing on an exceptional design for your site signifies trust to those who will be able to see it, as it is a signal that the site means business and that it will be staying on the web for a long time.

Most internet users these days have low attention span, but having a visually appealing layout and images on your site can increase the chances of your visitors to stay on the page.
Information

Once you have captured your visitors through your site’s psychologically alluring design, the content must be able to follow through in captivating your traffic to stay. The quality of the information that your site is offering is perhaps the most crucial part of the site’s overall marketing strategy, since this is the stage where people can judge if it’s really worth sharing or linking to.

A highly linkable content have two major components – research and effective copy. In my experience as an SEO, the most efficient way to create a linkable content, whether it’s a blog post or an independent page on your site, is to make it as unique, comprehensive and educational as you can to make it extremely interesting.

How to easily conceptualize and create a link worthy content:

* Search for similar theme of content through Google search, by basically keying in your content’s headline or title (ex “how to create a link bait”).
* List all the topnotch content from the results that you’ll find in an excel sheet and examine these pages. Identify the strong points of each content and the area of the subject that’s commonly missing.
* Gather all the information and make yours more comprehensive and competent compared to those that you have found, to amplify its quality. This will improve the response rate when you start requesting for links, seeing as it is unquestionably offering more value.

Noise Building

Building noise to your site as soon as it goes live will get your content out in the open. It is given that making your high quality content more visible to your target audience will enable it to attract more quality and natural links. And as you build noise, you are essentially developing your site’s linkability, natural link growth as well as your market’s awareness of your brand, because of its growing reputation across your industry.

Below are some of the most common methods that are used to build noise to your site (without the motive of acquiring links, but rather to attract linkers and natural links):

The Noise Effect

Posted in: SEO Advice