10 Steps to Social Link Building

Link building is important for organic ranking for search engine optimization. Over the years, social media has evolved to become the center point of traffic. It is so powerful that it can leverage a company’s website to increase their authority on the web. Here are 10 steps to increase traffic to your website through social link building:

1. Let your guest post blogs – Giving your visitors or guests the ability to blog is one of the fastest ways to attract links.
2. Contests – The internet is overflowing with opportunities for users to win prizes everyday. Contests allow you to easily engage your members. By them sharing and retweeting your posts, it will increase your brand exposure, links and leads.
3. Controversy – Covering topics that bring fire from both sides is a great way to attract visitors. The key element is to find a topic that can reasonably be defended on both sides and that has a interest to your target audience.
4. Directories – The days of the paperback phonebook are almost obsolete. A new generation of online directories are emerging that provide relevant search traffic. Much like Yellow Pages, sites like CitySearch and Yelp are built on the same concept and offer free business listings. Other opportunities to gain exposure could be through Alumni websites, local directories and industry directories.
5. Lists – Blog about “top lists” or “top resources.” This content is often overlooked, but it has the power to astound, entertain and provide us with actionable steps.
6. Define New Concepts – Defining new concepts and coining new terms that support your brand and teachings put a value that money can’t buy. Whether small or big you can make your website highly cited source. Great ways to do this is by: spotting new trends in your industry early, looking for complex ideas and starting discussions around these topics, and finding creative, short and memorable names for your new concepts.
7. How to Content – When people search for information online, they are trying to gather information that will help them do it the right way. Sometimes it is hard to find what we are looking for and we’d rather pay someone to spend the time, effort and energy to do it on our behalf.  Giving step-by-step or how to content is very effective. If they are accessible, instructional, and well researched visitors will come back for more.
8. Badges – Badges or banners should link back to your website or a specific web page. A mix between a logo and banner, a badge should serve as a mini-ad for you, but also carry value for your readers.
9. Social Networks – If your company is not on a social network, you are missing out. Social networks offer great opportunities for getting noticed and generating traffic to your website. Wikipedia lists more than hundred social media sites, but they relevant and well established sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. The posts on these networks should lead fans and followers back to your website.
10. Content Distribution – Companies should be looking at new ways to share their content. There are many places online that will post your articles. This will help with content distribution.