- Create unique content.
Just because you’ve written something great, does not mean you should put it up on all the pages on your site. Because it’s great and because people are linking to it, keep it in one place. Don’t let the message get watered down by copying and pasting it around your site.
- Set up tools to make it easy for your users to link to you.
Create a “link to us” page that makes it easy for your users to link to you in the manner you want. Provide them with easy to copy HTML code with simple instructions on how to add it to their page or blog.
- Make it fun to link to you.
By coming up with a gimmick, you can make it easy and fun for your users to link to you. If you come up with a widget where every time they view some code you provide, a link appears and a random image that’s humorous, they might use it more often. By making it fun and unexpected, your visitors will keep coming back and tell their friends.
- Plug the forums.
If you have content on your site that the world should read – hit the forums, blogs, communities, etc. and get the word out. Post links directly into your content. This will make spidering your content occur faster and more regularly the more links you can get into your site.
- Use text, not images.
Search engines love text and in many cases that is the only thing they understand. So if you have a choice, go for a typography heavy design, as opposed to image heavy. Your users will thank you for less download time and the search engines will thank you for easy content they can use.
- Do some keyword research.
There are a lot of keyword tools out there for you to use. My old standbys are overture keywords, wordtracker, and google keywords. There’s also the handy dandy lowtech idea of using a thesaurus to look up synonymous words.
- Add meta tags – title, keywords, description.
Decide what content you want to focus on for your domain after you have done some keyword research. Once you have those keywords you can crank out some titles, keywords, and descriptions. Although watch out for the title tag monster, as title tag abuse can strike at any time.
- Add unique meta tags – title keywords, description.
Now just because you add titles, keywords, and descriptions does not mean Google will jump for joy. They need to be unique to each page. So if you are using a CMS, make sure it is robust enough to customize these on a per page basis. If you are coding these based on user input, make sure they either enter them or you take some key bits of their content and use that as your meta information.
- Code it for the latest web standards.
By coding your site to the latest web standards (XHTML, CSS, XML, etc.) you can ensure that you will be using as little code as possible on the backend, so when your pages are spidered they only see content and not tag soup. This is also best practice for usability purposes as well and just to show off that you’re a smarty pants and on top of things.
- Write something worth reading.
If you’re users are bored to death, they will not be coming back first of all and second of all, they will not be linking to your site. If you can write something that they can email to their friends, add to del.icio.us, post on their blog, or otherwise distribute or publish, you are more likely to have them coming back time and time again and ideally linking to your content to increase your rankings.