The Art of SEO

Incentive-Based Link Marketing

Providing an incentive for people to provide a link back to you can work well. Of course, you need to do this with care, because there are incentives that would be indistinguishable from the outright purchasing of links and therefore risky. However, you can use certain tactics in which the resulting links will likely still have editorial value. This includes creating badges or levels of recognition that users will want to show off, as we discussed in Leveraging User-Generated Content. Here are a couple of other ideas.

Helping Other Sites Boost Their Value

You can get people to link to you because linking to you can enhance their site’s value. One example of this is a program that gives sites awards for excellence of some kind. This is particularly effective if your site is a respected authority in your space.

If that is the case, you can consider picking out the top 10 sites related to your space. Then you can send these sites an award badge with a link to a review that lives on your site.

Another example is various forms of certification. For example, Google has badges for its AdWords Qualified Professionals and AdWords Qualified Companies, with links back to Google.

Customer Discounts/Incentives

Publishers can offer visitors from certain websites a discount on the publisher’s product. Sites that want to offer the discount to their users simply need to link back to the publisher’s site.

However, Google also sees this as a questionable practice. Although ...