7 Quick and Dirty Link Building Tips for Authors

I’m pretty new when it comes to ebook publishing, but I’ve been making a living from my websites for the last six years, and I’ve had to learn a thing or two about search engine optimization along the way (yeah, it’s about as scintillating a topic as it sounds). SEO is the art (or scheme, depending on who you talk to) of making your site rank more highly in the search engine results.

It works a lot like your sales ranking at Amazon. A high ranking means people find your site/book and check it out. Anything off the first few pages means you’re languishing in obscurity. If that’s the case when it comes to your author site or blog, you’re probably getting a small amount of visitors, either from your promotional efforts on social media sites such as Twitter or from somewhat random “long tail” keyword terms that a smattering of people type into Google.

Link building, AKA gradually getting more people to link to your site over time, is the tried and true way to improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc.

Here are seven things to keep in mind when you’re working to acquire links:

1. Get as many one-way links to your site as you can

I recently saw a post in one of the ebook forums where an author wanted to swap links with lots of other author buddies to increase… I’m not sure what he hoped to increase. Book sales, I guess. If you want to maintain a blogroll and link to related sites as a resource for your visitors, then by all means do so, but link exchanges don’t get you far with the search engines these days.

What you want is one-way links to your site, meaning someone links to you and you don’t have to link back. Two ways to achieve this are through guest blogging and article syndication. If you can get interviews or reviews from book bloggers, these can also be sources of links. There are others. Be creative.

2. Anchor text, anchor text, anchor text

This is huge in SEO, and I don’t see many authors using it. Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. One of the ways search engines know what your site is about is through the anchor text people use when linking to your site (back in the day, people used to write a whole bunch of spammy pages that repeated the keywords they wanted to rank for over and over, so these days it’s not just about what you write on your site but what others say you write).

Anchor text that sucks:

https://www.lindsayburoker.com

http://www.amazon.com/The-Goblin-Brothers-Adventures-ebook/dp/B004FPYPSO/

These “naked” links don’t tell the search engine much.

Anchor text that sucks less but still isn’t preferable:

Lindsay Buroker

The Goblin Brothers Adventures

Why? Because next to nobody is Googling my name or my book. If they were, I’d be making a living as an author by now.

The problem we all have starting out is that nobody knows who we are. They’re not finding our books, and they’re not finding our blogs, because they’re not looking us up by name. We want our pages to appear for things people are looking for.

Anchor text that wouldn’t suck for my sites:

Ebook publishing

Kids ebooks

Why? Because that’s what these sites are about, and those are terms people actually type into the search engines. (We’ll talk later about how to find out what people are typing in that’s related to your genre or niche.)

I know that when it comes to getting a book review, you may not have much say in the anchor text department (hey, you’re just tickled someone is reading your book and writing it up!), but with guest blogging and especially article syndication, you can usually write your own links into the content and make sure the anchor text says something good.

3. Not all links are created equal

We all have limited amounts of time in the day for marketing our books and our blogs. If it’s possible to guest blog at a popular site, it’s going to do more for you than posting on another author’s site that’s just as obscure as yours. The search engines give more weight to links from “authority sites” (older, established sites with lots of incoming links).

Check the Alexa ranking of a site and compare it to your own to get a feel for the amount of traffic its getting. If it’s a blog, look at how many months of archives are over in the side. See how many people are commenting on posts.

If you go through the effort of writing a guest post, you want to make sure someone’s going to see it!

4. Get deep links (links to the back pages of your site)

Most people only worry about getting links to their front page and maybe the page where they highlight their books. But if you have a blog, you have lots of pages, and some of them might be filled with great informative content that you want people to find.

For example, one of my more popular pages is the Ebook Publishing Primer, and people find it via terms such as “kindle ebook publishing.” (If you don’t know which of your pages are popular and how people are finding them, sign up for Google Analytics.) Since the page has become relatively popular without me doing anything, think how much traffic it might get if I worked on getting keyword-rich links to it.

5. Don’t waste your time commenting on people’s blogs for “link building purposes”

While it’s absolutely fine to comment on blogs (please comment on mine if you like this post!) as a way to build relationships with other authors and industry people, don’t make this your link-building strategy. Links in blog comments are usually “no-follow,” meaning the search engines won’t pay attention to them. (There is an exception: some WordPress bloggers install a plug-in called KeywordLuv, which makes those links count, but generally you’ll be better off spending your time on other tactics.)

6. Don’t waste much time on directory submissions either

Back in the day, you used to have it made if you could get a link from the DMOZ Directory because it was used by Google and syndicated on a zillion other sites. Times have changed though.

Links from directories and “link farms” don’t count for much. Links in the content of the page are best (i.e. smack in the middle of someone’s blog post), and, all other factors being equal, the fewer other links sharing the page with yours the better.

That said, it only takes a few seconds to submit your site to the major directories (i.e. Yahoo, DMOZ), and it can’t hurt to get a link from them (these links tend to be slow coming these days though). You can also look for niche directories related to your site and submit to those. Don’t spend a lot of time on this though. Also it is not worth paying for someone to do this for you.

7. Write content that people want to link to

This last one is easier said than done. Like… write a good book, right?

But some posts are more likely to attract other people’s attention than others (we all like to share good finds, so we tend to link to those posts from our own sites).

Here are a few “linkable” types of blog posts/articles:

• Guides and helpful information
• Things that are cool and/or funny
• Posts that have an answer to the eternal “what’s in it for me?” question (i.e. Contests/Giveaways)
• Inspirational posts (one of my other popular posts is the “Thriller Author Makes $620 a Day Selling Kindle Ebooks” one)

Whew, that’s seven! This ought to be enough to keep you busy for a while.

Just remember that link building isn’t like buying a sponsorship on Kindle Nation. It’s not going to shoot your blog to the #1 position for “romance books” in a week. It’s something that will gradually increase the amount of traffic coming to your site. The great thing about it is that links are usually permanent, so the efforts you put in over the coming months will keep paying off for years to come (less true of something like Twitter where your “tweet” is off people’s radars within hours or maybe even minutes).

Good luck!