Authority Link Building: How To & Instructional Sites
The web has evolved away from a “Top Down” model where experts “give” content to the masses, towards a more inclusive model of collaborative sharing. This “Bottom Up” model recognizes that everyone is an expert in something and relies on individuals to share knowledge with others. Empowering individuals, it allows anyone and everyone to share content, videos, images, etc thus teaching and helping others.
How To & Instructional Sites are built around this democratic model of informational sharing. They allow users to create accounts and share their knowledge, thus creating massive repositories of information on all topics under the sun. By opening up content contribution to users, the amount of content that is produced is vastly exacerbated.
When using these sites for link building purposes, it’s important to offer unique and valuable information that hasn’t been offered before, so it actually offers value to users.
Here’s a few of my favorite sites:
about.com
squidoo.com
5min.com
ehow.com
tricklife.com
instructables.com
quora.com
wonderhowto.com
firehow.com
howtodothings.com
Some of these sites, like about.com, are quite difficult to get content or links published. Editors are very demanding and only share content they believe is unique and high quality. Squidoo has been recently devalued by google during the Penguin update, so it is no longer a source of valuable links. However, for the purpose of variety and appearing natural, it definitely has a place in your link building and marketing campaign. You can use squidoo to support your other channels, or to target very long tail keywords where there aren’t a lot of competing pages. Quora is a Q&A site where you can answer questions and establish yourself as an authority.
When creating these pages, make sure you link out to other relevant highly authoritative sources on the same topic. This will diversify your web map and connect you to other relevant sites. Additionally, if you have written other quality content on other web 2.0 sites, you can link out to those sources to build your link popularity at various tiers.
By establishing a presence on these sites and creating articles, you will accomplish 5 aims:
- Increase inbound links to yours sites
- Establish yourself as an authority in your niche
- Create variety in your inbound link profile
- Create a presence in the social web which is a ranking signal
- Creates content that you can share with your social followers
Start browsing these sites today and search for that golden opportunity where you can share relevant, high quality content!
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