Though social link building is hot, hot, hot, traditional forms have not lost their importance. This post looks at (trust me) ten ways you can find valuable backlinks to help your ecommerce site’s search rankings.

Low Hanging Link Fruit

Ounce of prevention

Before you look to build new links, why not protect the ones you have? How does your site handle product pages for items you no longer carry? It’s a bad user experience to keep them in the catalog, but dropping them means spoiling some SEO. Make sure you have a plan to either keep them (and updating the page to the new product version, merchandise with alternative product suggestions), or 301-redirect to somewhere on your site, be it your home page or a category page or the new version of the product.

Repeat business

Another trick is to reach out to sites that already link to you and look for new opportunities. Was it a blogger that loved your product? Was it a news item? It’s easier to get “repeat business” than approach brand new sites, so check your backlink results for opps to reach out again.

When evogear.com changed its domain to just evo.com, the team reached out to me to update links, and I ended up blogging about their brilliant idea here on Get Elastic, which earned them another link.

There are a number of backlink checking tools out there, both free and paid. The paid tools are worth it if you want to do serious link analysis (e.g. SEOmoz’ Open Site Explorer and Link Research Tools) will show you segmented links like social, news and blogs, and domain authority scores to help you hone in on the most valuable targets first. If you want a freebie, BackLinkWatch is decent.

Social circle

Not only can you create business profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others and link back to your home page, most social networks allow you to place links to other websites from your personal profiles as well. Encourage your employees to create LinkedIn profiles and add our site, even if they move on from your company these links can stay in their profiles.

But social profiles are typically low-value links because they are easy to set up. Help build up their clout by linking back to them from your site. Not just your business profiles, but also personal ones. Do you have a page with your employees listed?

Howdy partner

Partners and suppliers are great sources for links, but so are your technology vendors. Why not participate in a case study (your vendor will love you), and negotiate a direct link to your site as part of the deal? Bonus points if you can get a brief description of your site with semantically relevant keywords, for example “online textbook marketplace UniXchange…”

Blog Baiting

Blogs are great to target because they are so plentiful, tend to be topical, have regular, subscribed readers and often list the blogger’s name and email address for easy contact.

There are a few ways to get on bloggers’ radars. Here are just a few:

PR pitch

Blogger outreach is very much like traditional PR — blogs are online media, after all. Remember, to get any traction you must first have something remarkable to pitch.

What makes a remarkable story? Check out what these retailers did:

Best Buy Remix

Best Buy’s Remix program offers developers a crack at building their own shopping apps with Best Buy’s API. Major tech blogs like Mashable licked this story up.

Moosejaw Mountaineering X-Ray App

The jaw-dropping moosejaw app that reveals what its catalog models are sporting underneath their gear was perfect fodder for the Huffington Post, Mashable and more.

Sears’ People’s Pick

Doing something innovative with social media will also get you buzz. Sears’ People’s Pick crowdsources its Black Friday deals.

Here’s a sampling of the sites that found this story blogworthy.

But don’t just send bloggers copies of your press releases, and please don’t start off the email with “I love your blog and really enjoyed reading {insert last post here}.” Rather, demonstrate that you understand the audience and the type of content the blogger usually writes about by explaining (briefly) how your story will delight the blog’s readers.

You can also pitch your executives as experts for interviews, for example to provide “predictions” or other business stories to various media (not just blogs).

Bonus tip: Infographics are also so-hot-right-now, so coming up with a killer one is a trendy way to win you some blog love.

Guest post

Offering to guest post can help you build backlinks via your author byline, often from a URL that is topically relevant to what you are selling.

Here’s a tip, use the Dogpile search engine that shows results from both Google, Yahoo and Bing using the term “your keyword] + “guest post”, and repeat searches with “guest author” or “guest writer” to find opportunities.

Don’t take it personally if a blogger no longer accepts guest posts or declines your offer. Bloggers often blog because it’s a way to get their own voice out there. Just keep hunting and you’ll certainly uncover opportunities.

Give it away now

Giveaway blogs are a great way to build links and get your product exposed to potential buyers. Giveaway bloggers are already open to promoting commercial businesses, so you’re likely to have better luck than with other types of pitches. Of course, you want to go for the higher trafficked blogs first, but even the lesser-read ones are still worth it for the link value.

Do-Gooding

Sponsoring good causes or holding charity events can get ya links and help out your fellow man. Just sayin’. evo is an example of both.

Find What is Broken

Here’s a trick from my link building days – it had a higher “conversion rate” (links gained/contacts made) than any other method. Find a page that links to your competitor or a related site and run a backlink check on it. If there’s a broken link, contact the webmaster to report the bug and suggest 2-3 additional links that may be of interest (including yours). Make sure they’re relevant! You’ve already offered something of value, which gives the webmaster motivation to actually go in and change code. But keep it ethical and be transparent about your affiliation with your own link suggestion.

I like to use iWebTool because it’s fast and free, but you can use any broken link checker you like.

The Old Fashioned Way

Of course, there’s the old-skool way of link building, scoping the backlinks of your competitors. So long as you’re patient to wade through spammy sites, you’ll find some good opportunities.

And don’t forget, social link building. Put these all together and with a little elbow grease you’ll have a nicely rounded link profile.

Got your own killer link building tip for ecommerce? Please share in the comments.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Links from topically relevant and authoritative sites serve as signals of quality for the content they point to. The authority of a web page, or “Page Rank” in Google lingo, flows from one web page to another through (most) links, making link building a staple SEO strategy, but also one that has been abused by spammers. Thus, the “rules” around what makes a valuable link changes frequently, from an importance on reciprocal links and directories (abused through link farms), to keyword-rich anchor text (abused by paid links), to deep-links, and to today’s vogue – social links.

Search engines have confirmed that social signals do factor in their ranking algorithms, and that Facebook and Twitter links are considered, provided 301 redirects are used by URL shortening services. Social networks like Twitter may automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute, but links can be found by search engines through other data feeds.

Though we don’t know exactly which types of links are counted and which ignored, it’s reasonable that factors such as the authority of the social profiles that share and re-share links and their semantic relevance (the keywords surrounding the link) are important. Social linking strategies should keep this in mind.

Let’s explore 5 strategies:

Like, Share, Plus One Buttons

Simply having Twitter, Facbook and Google Plus buttons on your product pages and email campaigns is a link building strategy in itself. These “chicklets” enable passive word of mouth — free link building provided by your own site visitors, customers and fans. You may not get thousands of thumbs up on most of your products, but the long tail of sharing a few times over thousands of products can add up to a lot of exposure for very little effort.

There’s no harm in adding social buttons to product pages, email campaigns, home pages and microsites, other than the potential drag on your page load speed (like analytics code, they should be loaded after the core page content).

35 million Facebookers (1 in 4 account holders) have shared a product with their network, and 35% are more willing to buy a Liked product, so this is a no-brainer.

Your own accounts

Of course, you can leverage your own social media profiles to share new products, sale events and other content. But just submitting your own links likely doesn’t cut it. Search engines can figure out when links are shared by an account associated with a website (do you link to your site from your profile, hmmmm?) They want to see volume of shares or authoritative accounts sharing your links. Working on building up a strong fan base is essential, as is keeping them interested and making your content “share worthy” – complete with headlines that pique interest. Easier said than done, but a good challenge for your campaign strategists.

Hint: Surround your shared links with relevant keywords or hashtags, and try to include keywords in your site pages that you intend to share. Even if they are shrunk with link shorteners, search engines will follow the redirects and account for these keywords.

Hint, hint: Choose your URL shortener wisely. Though most use 301 redirects, some don’t. You’ll be safe with Goo.gl, Bit.ly, Ow.ly and Cli.gs. For more info, check out this article on which url shortening service you should use.

Paid tweets

If you want Kim Kardashian to gush about how much she hearts your handbags, you can pay your way into her feed through a service called – you got it – SponsoredTweets.com (the same folks that invented the PayPerPost service in 2006).

But note that sponsored tweets are, like paid posts and any other paid links, ethically to be disclosed with the hashtag #ad. Treat paid tweets as advertising, not link building.

The #ad hashtag may be a signal that search engines use to discount such links.

PR

Not Page Rank, but the other-other PR, public relations. You’ve used PR to reach out to bloggers and journalists, and these folk often have Twitter accounts as well. In fact, you’re more likely to get a tweet than a full blog post when you pitch, as they take far less time to craft.

Because tweets sent through influencers are suspected to have more clout with search engines, even one or two tweets of this sort can pay off. If you are reaching out with PR, suggest keywords be included in the tweet, like #hashtags.

Customer campaigns

Share-with-your-network calls-to-action in email and social network channels are an underused tactic. Social links are common, but they’re usually of the “Follow Us” variety, comfortably tucked away in header menus.

Or, footer menus.

I suggest being aggressive, and placing the calls-to-action in the content space of your email. Kohl’s is specific that the call-to-action is to forward the email message, rather than simply Like or Tweet the brand.

(Kohl’s example via Retail Email Blog)

Social linking is important – but it hasn’t replaced traditional backlinks. Stay tuned, next post we’ll revisit some of the tried-and-true strategies that can help keep your link profile growing and well-rounded.

Looking for help with your ecommerce strategy and site optimization? The Elastic Path research and consulting division is available to enterprises selling digital goods and services. For more information, visit us at http://elasticpath.com/ecommerce-consulting/ or contact us at consulting@elasticpath.com.