Is your website a link building officer? If not, get a badge.
Quick Summary of Contents
- 1 Content created for Search Engines: The old way of rising to page one.
- 2 Beware of link and content farming.
- 3 Content creation is meant to be consumed and shared by humans.
- 4 What are badges, and why do I offer badges on my website?
- 5 Who are badges really made for?
- 6 Time for simple and complex badge examples.
If you’ve been around search engine optimization or even search engine marketing, then you understand and comprehend the power of link building and its vital importance to your website.
Whether you’ve enjoyed the glorious wonders of link building, with your website showered in thousands of comments, social shares, and love from related websites, or you’ve endured the horrifying ordeal of negative link building with utterly unrelated sites, fear not!
Today, we have a link-building nugget that will work its automagical powers to transform your website into a magnet for online brand ambassadors.
One of the main baselines for building traffic and a trove of links shared throughout the internet is writing original, useful content.
Content created for Search Engines: The old way of rising to page one.
Before search engines implemented extensive algorithms to sniff out those websites obtaining their content and links from farms and networks, less than stellar link building, content creation, and duplication were a breeze to implement and rank high for all major search engines.
These deceptive actions became a highly profitable and viable business model for many.
When search engines caught wind of such fraudulent and gaming activities taking place, search engines politely allowed the highly ranked and searched websites involved in such corrupt activities to exit the stage left.
This heavy slap of the hand left certain offenders with highly penalized and less visible websites in search, and others completely removed from the search engines.
Let this be a lesson to always strive for useful and valuable content created for humans, not search engines.
Beware of link and content farming.
One way of creating content is to outsource your website’s content creation; however, we are of the opinion that the best way to create useful content is for the business to own the content creation in its entirety and not a 3rd-party source.
Be forewarned that should you choose to outsource your website content and are found guilty of duplicate or plagiarized content, search engines will penalize your website to the point of online nonexistence.
Yes, acquiring content and link farming services will work for a few months, but it is in your business’s best interest not to participate in such deceptive SEO practices, all for the sake of generating greater customer growth and revenue.
Once a trove of useful and valuable content has been created for humans and not search engines, one can now provide a systematic way to share both content and website brand.
The sharing of content is native and usually simple in nature should your website is built on a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
And if not using a CMS, adding social sharing buttons, such as Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, or Emailing, are quite easy to add to your website.
What are badges, and why do I offer badges on my website?
Creating your website to be an effective and efficient link-building officer is made easy when creating opportunities for others to become online brand ambassadors of your website. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating badges.
Badges are much like stickers that represent your brand that others think are cool enough to wear rather than display on their website.
Notice we say badges and not text links. If you try to pass text links as badges, search engines will consider you to be practicing bad link scheming practices and penalize your website.
When creating badges, remember badges are nothing more than linked images with proper and descriptive alt text.
Who are badges really made for?
When implemented correctly badges, badges have great search engine reach and are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Badges typically find their comfy spot of warmth on the sidebars of bloggers.
We encourage your business to seek out niche-specific bloggers with high-quality ranking websites to help promote your online brand.
Remember, garbage in is garbage out. If you select low-quality ranking websites, you’ll only hurt your website’s brand and help your website’s brand.
Time for simple and complex badge examples.
Let’s take a quick look at two examples: BestAustinPhotographers.com and WeAreSafeAndSound.com.
Complex Badge Example: BestAustinPhotographers.com
BestAustinPhotographers.com is a website aiming to help locals find the best photographers in Austin, Texas (see screenshot).
In the upper left-hand corner of the website, there are 2 website links, one for Home and the other for Badges. Click the link for the badges to visit the badges page (see screenshot).
BestAustinPhotographers.com badge page is very simple, as yours should be.
You can create more than one badge, creating as many as you would like. If you provide more than one type and various sizes, you’ll find bloggers love options.
You only need images, HTML, and HTML Textareas to create badges.
BestAustinPhotographers.com uses javascript and PHP/MySQL to verify whether a blogger’s website has been voted as the best Austin photographer.
If the blogger’s website has been verified, then a badge is created dynamically and shown on the blogger’s website as being voted a BestAustinPhotographers.com website.
If not verified, then the blogger’s website shows a badge recommending visitors to visit BestAustinPhotographers.com.
BestAustinPhotographers.com uses a more complex badge creation and management system.
Simple Badge Example: WeAreSafeAndSound.com.
WeAreSafeAndSound.com is a free emergency and disaster service for individuals to use to mass notify family and friends when a disaster occurs and they’re displaced.
Being a free service to many people around the world, WeAreSafeAndSound.com focuses on banner use to promote its service on various preparedness blogs.
Unlike BestAustinPhotographers.com, WeAreSafeAndSound.com badges use very simple banners consisting of images, HTML, and alt tags, as shown below.
That’s it. Feel free to visit both sites. Use the badge code example below to build your own badges and to jump-start your website on its way to becoming a link-building officer with search engine authority.
HI Alvin, Been designing a badge recently and didn’t think to search to see if anyone had a blog on this, so very glad to read this one, very clear, concise and a great coded example too, thanks!
Sukh
Sukh,
You’re very welcome. Using badges has become a very good SEO method to increase the overall number of links, seeing you implement in a white-hat manner. Thanks and we’ll look release part two of this series in the coming weeks. Again, thanks for stopping by.