I'm always hearing about people wanting to improve their search engine rankings with link building campaigns, and there's a great amount of discussion as to how best to do this.
Thought I'd point a few of you in a slightly different direction.
Link bait is a term that I''m sure you're all familiar with, but what you might not know is that you can build links and get indexed on many different kinds of documents beyond the basic HTML page.
Doc files
PDF files
Excel spreadsheets
The list goes on. It's perfectly possible to place your link in these files and reap the reward in your link building campaign.
I used to run a website dedicated to online Spanish courses and it soon dawned on me how reluctant other Spanish sites were to link to me directly.
I took my time to come up with a few creative methods of getting my link out there and compiled a list of about 600 Spanish learning schools.
For every school, I plugged their contact details and address in to a nice PDF document. At the end of the document, I put in a simple footer note:
"This list was compiled by
MySiteHere.com"
I then went to town and drew up a huge list of Spanish resource sites. I wrote a remote PHP script to data mine the contact details of every site in the top ten pages for my desired keywords. Using some more PHP, I tidied my list and removed any duplicate entries - which are highly likely to appear if you scrape from multiple keywords in the same niche.
Using the contact details to build up a mailing list from my new database, I sent out an email which looked something like this.
"Hey, I was looking through your Spanish resources and I'm really grateful for such a good selection.
One thing I noticed was that you don't seem to have a complete reference for your visitors to contact the schools directly. I found this great re-distributable PDF with contact details for all of them. Feel free to use it on your site! It's pretty helpful"
Sure enough, about 1 in 5 webmasters responded positively and about 1 in 8 (from my rather basic review at the end of the project) went on to add the file.
This may seem hit and miss, but the websites were MUCH more willing to upload my relevant PDF than they were to link directly to a rival website.
I created an enormous amount of backlinks and also got myself a nice little bout of exposure in the specific files search.
There are many, many Black Hat ways of exploiting this technique, and I'll shortly be giving a full case study of one in my blog. Use your imagination and see for yourself if there's any way you can get your own re-distributable files out there.
