For your website to earn good rankings and your marketing campaigns to be successful, you need credible backlinks from relevant sites pointing at you.
When done right, link-building, one of the SEO basics, will improve your rankings in the searches and bring you more traffic. At the same time, it will boost your domain authority and your brand awareness, enhancing the engagement of your target audience.
However, as the human attention span has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in just a couple of years, both the content creation and link building are moving towards more visual content forms.
Here are the top eight design ideas for an efficient and more diverse link building strategy.
Short clips or animations and other visual elements in your articles can grab the attention of your target audience and encourage them to consume your pieces.
You can also use them on your social media accounts for showcasing your new products, celebrating certain events or holidays, etc.
The key to using animations for link building purposes is that they are versatile and highly sharable, and they can be used on various channels- you can use them on your website, blogs or social media.
When designing your own animations, make sure you’ve considered the needs and desires of your target audience. If the animations are high-quality and alluring, they will be easily picked up and shared by others, and the chances of getting more quality links pointing to your website will rise.
If you have a professionally designed and attractive logo, you can generate some backlinks by showcasing it on popular, design or logo-related websites with high domain authority.
Some of the websites that you could try contacting are The Logo Mix, Logo Critiques or Logo Moose, or you can do your own search for a website that could feature your logo.
Before submitting your logo to a website, do a spot check of its quality.
In addition to animations and your logo, you can use other types of your own, genuine visual content for link building.
You can get the best results by creating industry-related imagery, and avoid branding it. This way, the other subjects in your industry are more likely to feature it on their websites.
If you already have a decent amount of your own visual content on the website, you can easily determine whether someone has been using your creations without your consent – just visit Google Images and do a search of your website.
The next step is to click on each one of your images and choose “search image”. If someone’s been using it, the results will show.
If the website that’s been using your image has a good reputation, you could benefit from asking the website for an attribution link in return for featuring your image.
So, instead of stock imagery, opt for creating more authentic visual content, such as photos, illustrations, digital art and vectors.
You can make your link building strategy more diverse and more effective, by creating interactive content.
For example, you can easily build an HTML5 game for your customers to use or create a relevant niche quiz or survey to get information on your customers' or current industry trends.
Another great idea is to map relevant locations in your local community and use interactive content for generating more relevant local links and boosting your local SEO.
When designing such content, your business can highly benefit from hiring a local digital marketing agency that can fully answer your local SEO needs. If your business is situated in Queens, for example, you can check out affordable SEO services in New York as they are most likely to have a direct and thorough insight into all the relevant circumstances.
The number of organic backlinks will rocket if you create a useful tool or a widget, that becomes an important resource for your customers, and can be widely used in your industry.
Host your tool on your website, and offer your widget for others to host – as long as it’s functional and displays relevant info in easy to digest manner, it has a great capacity for delivering stunning results.
To make an impact with your content, you need to grab your prospects’ attention fast. The content that is efficient in fulfilling this goal has great potential for building backlinks. Visual aids, such as infographics, can be perfect for this purpose.
While they are more fun and engaging than text, infographics can make complicated info easy to grasp and understand. Furthermore, they make use of tables, charts and graphs,so they can show your expertise and make you seem more credible.
You can use infographics to show the current trends in your industry,make a guide for complex service, give a break down of your manufacturing process, etc.
For even better results, you can opt for creating animated and interactive infographics.
Designing downloadable printable content and offering it to the relevant websites is another great way for acquiring more backlinks to your content.
For example, you can create an eBook with relevant tips and trips in your industry, industry-related flashcards for learning purposes, Bingo cards or your own games for people to print and play.
Make sure that you brand this kind of content for maximum benefits.
Uploading your presentations to relevant websites, such as SlideShare, is another way to put your existing content to good use.
Before saving your presentation in PDF format and uploading it, ensure that you’ve added a hyperlink URL address to your website.
Besides getting the backlink, your branding efforts will benefit, and you may even get a boost in traffic too.
Use the ideas below to make your link building strategy more diverse and effective, generate more organic traffic to your website and improve your bottom line.
AUTHOR BIO
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.