Local Links For Local People

Local links for local people! (Image - League Of Gentleman BBC)

A quality link for me is an editorial  link on a real site – a site that’s been around for years. The site in question is well linked to itself, and dooesn’t sell links – and is careful who they link to. These sites are kind of hard to get links from – but that’s the point…

Strategy? Well you live somewhere. You live in a town or a city, in a region, in a wider region. Just type these 3 regions – one at a time – into Google, and Google will return a list of potential link partners. Hundreds of them. Live in the wilderness? Look at your nearest city.

Deployment? Offer a discount, or give away free stuff (Google does this) for a mention on their site IF they don’t have any real reason to link to you.

Other sites will link to your site if you give them a reason to:

  1. Your local Council – a lot of council sites have local business directories
  2. Your local College or University – offer a student discount
  3. Your local Chamber of Commerce – join, or offer a discount to members
  4. Your local Newspaper – you should always be trying to get a mention in the local press – consider a competition
  5. Local football club & supporters club – discount = mention on their site
  6. Local sports clubs – there’s a ton of them in every town usually with crusty old sites – offer them a discount, donate or sponsor them for a mention on their site.
  7. Local Business Directories – More often than not, somebody has built a local biz directory covering your local area. Get in there.
  8. Local faith groups or other local community groups – When it comes to business, I ain’t got no denomination. Discount anybody?
  9. Local charities – a link you can probably buy! Sponsor a charity site for a mention – Google would be REALLY MEAN to penalise this sort of link buying on a small scale – and anyway, their attention is probably on bigger sites.
  10. Local businesses – offer a discount to staff

These links aren’t all easy to get and will take time to get (if your comparing them to how fast you can buy or get links on sites these days that offer no value to your site in the long term). See what I did there.

The EASIER a link is to get, generally speaking, the more USELESS it is in terms of Google ranking your site higher – unless you know what you are doing…..

So while your competiors are off buying links on crap third world domain hosting companies, submiting to 100,000 useless search engines, submitting to 100 useless directories, spamming dofollow blogs and forums or hiring a social media consultant to get 10,000 non-paying visitors from Digg etc etc you are picking up nice little, quality long term links on trusted sitess that probably are not being abused, and will fly right under any Google manipulation-radar, and all will help to build your domain authority and trust in Google results pages.

And all these kind of links above can be mixed and match to a national campaign if you know how to scale your efforts in a sensible manner.

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