One of the biggest challenges in SEO for b2b firms is linkbuilding. With a traditional website, the opportunities to establish high authority, inbound links are few and far between. Comparatively few sites will be interested in linking to a company that fabricates aluminum siding or sells and services forklift trucks.

Obtaining links from directories is one approach b2b firms use to overcome this problem. For insight on their effectiveness, read The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Linkbuilding, by Rand Fishkin.

Another approach to linkbuilding, one that I’ve seen work extremely well over the past five years, is blogging. A b2b blog attracts links to the home page, as well as deep links, which are extremely important to the overall search performance of you a domain.

How a B2B Blog Helps Linkbuilding

Participate in a group blogging project. Bloggers host projects all the time, so it’s not hard to find one that is relevant and/or interesting. The project host and often, participants, will post a project summary which include links to other entries. To track open projects and contests, visit the Group Writing Projects blog by Jacob Share.

Host a group project. Project hosts receive lots of link love from participants who are promoting the project before, during, and after the event. They will link to the host’s home page and project announcement post.

Blogrolls. We don’t talk much about blogrolls anymore, but serious bloggers often list their favorite blogs on a separate page or on their sidebar.

Zemanta. Zemanta is a content creation tool many bloggers use to add images and relevant links to their posts. I’ve found it to be an excellent source of inbound links – mainly because of the high relevancy factor. Zemanta links use post titles for anchor text, so presumably you’ll have keywords in the anchor text as well – also important.

Apture. Apture is another content creation tool that makes it easy for bloggers to incorporate relevant inbound links into their posts. The general point here is that technology is making it easier for bloggers to link out. It makes sense for b2b firms to blog and tap in.

Comment Links. Including a link to one of your blog posts in a comment on another blog creates an inbound link to your site. This technique should be used with great discretion, however. As a rule bloggers don’t like their discussion platform used as a vehicle for linkbuilding. I never include links to one of my posts in a comment unless the link is totally relevant to the conversation and I know the blogger. This is an area where you must think quality, not quantity.

CommentLuv. At the risk of contradicting what I said just above, many bloggers use an aptly named WordPress plugin called CommentLuv to automatically create a link to the commenter’s most recent post.

More Inbound Links Equals More Traffic Equals More Inbound Links

The cumulative effect of all these inbound links is more relevant traffic coming to the site. As the b2b blog develops a broader community of readers, more opportunities occur for others to link to that site. And we haven’t even talked about increased traffic from RSS and email subscriptions and the new powerhouse sources of traffic – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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word sell inc chicago online marketing servicesChicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content strategy consulting.