You have huge content ideas and the incentive to make, but if your site isn’t link-friendly, you might still be up the well-known creek. Let me give a perfect example from one of my favorite bloggers. I was about to connection to this site because they had a relevant article to my next post. But their article was nearly illegible because of all the monetization around it. Hey, it’s good to sell ads, but… So now they’re formally in the usability hall of disgrace.
And they’re in the “no link for you hall of shame” to boot. Yes, folks, the quality of your design, the release method of your message and the user experience you provide all heavily impact the links you’re able to earn. Let’s look at some of the site attributes that can make or break a link:
Attain all of the positives on the list while dodging all the negatives is incredibly hard, but there are a few sources that do so with impressive results. Wikipedia is the first that comes to mind, but the BBC, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the Discovery Channel and many of the top blogs fulfill a great number of these decisive factor.
In adding to these, there are specific elements that you can use to “encourage” link creation, but I’ve got an early presentation tomorrow so we’ll have to save that for Thursday morning content.
