For affiliates, link building is one of the easiest, and cheapest, methods for increasing both page rankings and site traffic. Anyone who is new to the affiliate business will probably feel a little overwhelmed by the abundance of forum postings offering links for sale and trade. But the best option for link building is blagging a link.
What is Blagging?
Blagging is a term that isn’t used a lot in the United States, but is relatively common in Europe and the U.K. If you’ve been blagging it simply means you’ve achieved your goals by clever, but not quite devious, methods.
When applied to link building and back linking strategies, the term blagging means that you’ve circumvented the less-than-natural environment of search engine ranking algorithms.
On a recent CAP webinar, SEO Strategies for 2012: 4 Solutions to Effective Link Building Exposed, Media Skunk Works founder Paul Reilly and Unibet’s Nick Gardner point out that nothing happens naturally on casino sites. That’s simply the nature of the gaming business.
Consequently, web masters must rely on their wits to figure where the most valuable placements for their links are going to be.
Blagging Strategies
According to Reilly, there are four main types of sites where your links can wind up:
- Authority sites that offer straightforward, legitimate content that’s designed primarily to inform readers.
- Affiliate sites that are designed to send customers to casinos.
- Affiliate sites that consist primarily of paid links from other affiliates.
- Purpose built link directories that contain dozens, or even hundreds of links to similar sites.
In terms of quality, the first two options are the most effective for driving traffic and building numbers. So how can you start getting your links on these sites?
Birds of a Feather
For starters, you probably don’t need to pay for link placements. Reilly recommends affiliates avoid working with link brokers unless they have an established, and trusted, relationship with that broker. After all, this is something that you can do at little or no cost by yourself, but you’ll need to start building solid relationships of your own.
Every year there are multiple opportunities for affiliates and web masters to meet up at various industry conferences. Besides valuable seminars and these get togethers provide valuable networking opportunities for people in a business that has very little in the way of face time.
Simply being able to associate a name with a site is often times all it takes to set up a valuable link exchange opportunity. The more you put yourself out there, the more chances you’ll have at making connections that will pay off in the future.
Quality Counts
As with aspect of SEO, quality counts. The better the content you’re offering, the more attractive your sites will be to other web masters, search engines and customers. We all know that Google rewards quality content, and that goes for the places you’re linked to, too.
There’s no reason to post keyword stuffed garbage on your site, because it simply won’t help you. No one wants to hang around a site that doesn’t offer value.
What are some of you tips for blagging links? Tell us about them in our Search Engine Optimization forum.