Link Building SEO Tip – Using Badges To Build Inbound Links

As you know we talk a lot about link building here for a bunch of reasons. Developing a solid inbound link building strategy is very time consuming and will not give you that overnight success we all look for in our SEO efforts but the more link building tactics we use the better chance our success rate will be. I want to talk about using a homemade badge to help build link popularity to your site.

Let assume you have a B2C or B2B site. I am going to use Yellow Bear Shop.com (YBS). This site is owned by Julie, one of our readers of my blog. YSB is a site that specializes in gifts for babies and has thousands of products to choose from. Let’s leverage customers from YSB to help drive link popularity into the site.

First of all we need to create a set of badges for the B2C side and the B2B side. So we have created “Preferred Shopper” and “Preferred Partner” badges that available for anybody who has a website to display. Now the challenge is how do you get consumers and businesses to display your badges? I would offer an exclusive incentive such as free shipping or a small discount as I feel this will satisfy the “what’s in it for me” syndrome. Yes, some might display your badge without a need for something in return but I do feel this will really lift your usage of others displaying the badge and thus increasing your inbound links and showcases that you have good relationships with your customers/partners, which is very important for search engines to see and “realize” your network growing.

I would also suggest you design your badges in CSS as image replacement as this will allow you to use anchor text in the badge which is very important in your link building strategy. Be careful to use only the words that describe your badges in that anchor text as you do not want to show the search engines anything that they would consider SPAM.

Tagged as: asking for links, badges, inbound link building