If you want to successfully market your business online, you need to generate great links for your site.

SEO is all about links.  Jay-Z wanted “Girls, Girls, Girls”.  You want “Links, Links, Links”.

(It might help to sing “I want lee-inks, lee-inks, links” each morning to keep the focus going.)

Every business we’ve successfully built with Growth Partner has benefitted from a steady supply of high quality links.  There are already a lot of good guides on how to build links online, and here’s a discussion of what makes up a “quality” link.

Here are 5 ways to go about getting links you might’ve not tried before:

1. Start a glossary. Any site in the world can have a glossary.  Hire a freelance writer to put together a unique glossary around your topic.  Put it up on your site at /glossary.html, and then go email a bunch of relevant sites in your niche about it.

There are also a bunch of sites that link to multiple glossaries.  You can find this with a “inurl:glossary” search in Google.  These likely won’t be as valuable links, but they will be easier to get.

The best links you’ll get out of this are the niche sites around your topic, who find the glossary useful for their visitors.

2. Start a legit scholarship. Start a yearly scholarship sponsored by your company.  Host it on your main site, with a sign up form.  Then go contact university websites and scholarship sites to get a link.

Don’t be shady about this – give a legit scholarship to someone.  Maybe it’s $2,000, maybe it’s $5,000.  Site owners might think you are not legit at first, but you can solidify the scholarship in two ways.

First, send notices out to the winning person’s school that they won (bonus: It might get featured in a school newsletter that gets posted on the school website).  Second, profile the student on your scholarship page.  Show a picture of them and interview them.

3. Anything can be a ‘calculator’. Widgets and calculators have always been easy ways to get links.  Consider this – any scenario where a user inputs a few bits of information in order to get a result can be a calculator.  That means any business or any site can make one.

Examples?  The “Find your hat size calculator”.  The “Best schools for you calculator”.  The “Laptop of your dreams calculator”.

Think along the lines of matching people with a result based on their input.  The link benefit can come in an embedded link in the calculator code (be sure to rotate them).  If it takes off, people will share it and you’ll get the best links virally.

4. Brand your blog. Years ago, boring company execs read a news story that pleaded them to start a company blog.  So they put up /blog on their site and posted about the company picnic and birthdays.  Maybe a new product or 2.

That’s weak, self-serving, and better for an internal company blog.  If you want links, you need to have a blog with some personality.  So dig into your niche and figure out how to brand your blog as a separate entity from the main website.

Give it a different name.  Focus it on a core customer segment.  And interact with that segment by having guest bloggers and guest blogging on their sites.  Again, don’t fake this.  You should care about these people and engage with them.

For the links, you can still host it at /blog.  Just call it something different and don’t talk about your company.  Talk about people.

5. Get married.
I’m serious.  Or have your employees get married.

Marriage announcements in newspapers can bring in links.  You know when they say “the bride-to-be is employed at _________________”?  That’s your shot.  Make sure they put a link in there.

A lot of companies struggle getting links from any mainstream news outlets.  You may think it’s goofy, but it’s probably one of your best chances.

Takeaway
Links.  It’s all about links.

Photos: Imagonovus and ptrol