Building Backlinks Tip 4: Contest

The link building series continues and if you thought there are only 3 ways to build backlinks and enhance your search engine ranking performance than you were wrong. The off page seo is that part of search engine optimization that never ends, if you had a to spend just a short amount of time to do your on page optimization than you are ready for the time consuming and smart playing off site SEO optimization.

The first three tips on building backlinks were the start that was going to get you noted to a certain point and gain you some readers to your blog. Once you have reached a certain amount of audience of readers that read your blog, than you are most probably able to play this smart move but not to over do it.

In the first round of building backlinks tip I noted how much people love freebies, but that is not only for the online folks, it is even for the same people you see in your neighborhood every day. Try them, take something of small value one day and ask them if you would want it for free, you’ll see their reaction. Well this tip will require from your visitors something more than just the act to take something.

You have most probably seen this done by the big guys and has worked great, but only because they had a huge audience you got to note this pretty well. The same method has been used (and is still being used) from smaller bloggers/companies as well, giving away things for free. Yes i know, you are reading and thinking…what is he talking about, let me clear: CONTEST.

Running a contest and giving a valuable price does definitively work, people love freebies, people love the feeling to WIN something for free even if they can afford it. To run a contest is easy, the only requirement is a product that many of your readers will like it and the audience that reads your blog on daily basis. If you have a blog that gets 100 visitors a day the contest will be successful, but not as much as if you have a blog that receives 500 uniques a day or even 1000 uniques a day, so wait for the right moment to run that contest that will make BOOM, in meanwhile, you can always run smaller contests and give smaller prices, if there are just a few entries you will still be a winner if you don’t want to keep that product for yourself.

Rules of a contest are pretty much similar on all blogs, and here comes your interest hence you should make the rules not be so strict and give the freedom to users but in the same way to be able to benefit from it. When John Chow wanted to raise his RSS subscriber number he run a contest and the main rule to participate to the contest was to subscribe to his RSS reader. But since you have as price a product of value for the readers of your blog you can take that chance and not increase ONLY the RSS reader, you can as well raise the number of comments in your blog by placing as one of the rules to comment back to the contest post. There is still more space, that valuable space we need…back links to your blog. Most of these contest ask their readers if they want to participate to the contest to write about it on their blog and link back to the contest page or the homepage of the blog, this is a smart move as it costs nothing for a blogger to write about your contest and link back to your contest page or homepage, actually it gives them a new topic to write about for the day.

The more value the winning price has the more buzz your blog will receive, lets say if I was to run a contest on this blog I would rather want to give as winning price Aaron Walls SEO Book, or WebCEO or any other seo software or eBook related to search engine optimization. But play smart and don’t restrict your readers to link to your site or contest page with a certain keywords in anchor text, let them chose the right keywords they want to use even if the anchor text used in the link would be simply HERE.

If you restrict your users to use a certain keyword they most likely won’t like it and know the intention of the contest, it will also limit their way to express themselves on the post, but the most important is that if the blog contest will have success and you will increase a big amount of backlinks in a short time of period using the same exact keywords in the anchor text will most probably turn on the red light on the search engines and they will know something is going on. Remember, tricking a search engines algorithm is not only by selling text links, hence I was mad when problogger received his PageRank back and wrote about Google hitting our pocket and don’t care about their algorithm (but thats just how I personally feel about that issue).

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