Inbound links are a path to getting better organic search results, but not all links are created equally. Manipulative approaches that get tagged as spam do more harm than good, so it's worth paying attention when Matt Cutts, the guy at Google who is in charge of sifting out the spam, writes about the subject. In a recent posting on his blog, Cutts offers up tips for getting links. Quoting an excerpt from the post:
Become a resource:Publishing the kind of tutorial and background information that the higher ranking translation firm was providing would be an excellent use of a corporate blog.Provide valuable information. Be the first. Be the first means coming up with a creative idea that catches the fancy of the web.
- You can do this with a personal or company blog. Blogs are a great way to get link love or just to get your word out.
- If blogs sound scary, start out with newsletters. Or studies. Or surveys. Or white papers.
- Once a company (I’ll call them site A) that does language translations asked me why they didn’t rank as highly as another website (I’ll call them site B). When I checked it out, site A had very little content, just 5-6 pages with contact info and a short description of what they did. It was like an online brochure. So what did site B have? They offered a tutorial about the difference between Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji, plus they showed how to write a few characters. Who would you link to, the empty brochure site or the site with tutorial pages?
Noting that the post was written originally back in 2005, Cutts concludes:
[There you go. I think most of these ideas have aged pretty well.]Corporate blogs -- a legitimate SEO tool for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
