Easy Win Links You Might Be Missing

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Site owners are always on the lookout for “easy wins” when it comes to link building—minimal investment for maximum output. You’ll quickly find that truly valuable easy win links are few and far between, especially once you’ve been at it for a while, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t sitting on a potential goldmine of easy win links and just never realized it!

Here are four relatively easy win links that you might be overlooking:

404 errors.

Next time you’re in your Google Webmaster Tools account take a look at the Health tab. Any crawl errors in there? These 404 errors mean the Google bot was trying to access a certain URL and couldn’t because the page no longer exists. This is probably one of the easier easy win links out there because all it takes is a simple 301 redirect and you’re back in business! With a 301 redirect you can salvage the link juice and SEO value of those now defunct pages and pass it along to the live pages on your website and give them a little extra link building oomph. Depending on how large your website it, how frequently you update content or the last time you bothered to look there could be 100s of links waiting to be saved!

Author bios.

Do you write for any other blogs or industry sites? If you can, try to use a slightly edited author bio with different anchor text and links each time. This helps vary up your anchor text usage and prevents dozens (or hundreds) of links on the same domain from using the exact same anchor text. The more varied and natural your anchor text breakdown looks the better. Most sites give you at least two links in the author bio (and maybe one in the body of the post if you’re lucky) so take advantage of this easy win link building opportunity and take the links the sites are willing to give!

Social and business profiles.

You never want your company Facebook or Twitter page to be the last stop for a searcher. While your social and business profiles are valuable pieces of online real estate your website the most important tool you have when it comes to converting traffic and growing your business. Make sure all your social and business profiles link over to your main company website and company blog, and then to your other social profiles as well if they let you. The more connected your online presence is the easier it is to keep pulling visitors back to your website.

Online press releases.

I’m always amazed at how underutilized online press releases are for link building. Imagine if your release got picked up by a dozen news sites and you didn’t have any links in it—that means you missed out on a dozen+ easy win links! A good rule of thumb to follow is one link per 100 words (to prevent from coming across as spam). Be sure to get a good mix of full http links as well as a diverse spread of anchor text to keep your link building as natural as possible.

Local links.

If you are a local business it stands to reason you’ll want to build local links so the search engines recognize that you are indeed a local business. The Google Venice update made it so that searchers don’t have to look for localized keywords in order to receive localized results so you want to make sure Google knows exactly where your business is located. Does your town have a website? A local chamber of commerce website? Local news sites? Local bloggers? All of these local links are great additions to your link profile and as a local business it shouldn’t be too complicated to get listed in a local directory or guide.