Link Building Through Design

Alright, so I admit it, I sort of left my article on Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1, Part 2) hanging a bit there at the end on the topic of link building. I promised to come back to it, so here I am. I’m not going to bore you right now with all of the stuff you should already know and have heard at every SEO blog ever (“Submit to directories, ask other webmasters to trade links, yadda yadda yadda”). Instead I’m going to take it one tip at a time including the things I’ve found to be most helpful for generating a good number of quality backlinks to my sites.

The first link building tip is acquiring backlinks through your design.

Over the past couple of years there has been a design movement hell bent on creating pages using this new-fangled “CSS” (cascading stylesheets) versus the old-world table-based layouts. Using CSS gives you better control over your frontend, makes your code easier to read by spiders, and makes your website more accessible. I’ll be writing more on the benefits of CSS and its possible future later.

“How in the world does all this help me build backlinks?” Aside from being a good way to build your website, CSS is also a very trendy little fad within the web design world. As Digg users turn giddy when they hear about a new Apple product, web designers go out of their way to get their eyes on the latest CSS-based designs. This has lead to a modern day internet explosion known as the CSS gallery. CSS galleries are basically link depositories which display links, little screenshots, and usually a rating of the latest and greatest CSS-based designs. They are usually very easy to get into, and there are a ton of them on the net. Starting to see where I’m going with this?

The concept really is pretty simple:

  • Step 1: Design your site (try to make it look decent)
  • Step 2: Code it or have it coded in CSS (which frankly you should do anyway)
  • Step 3: Submit it to every CSS gallery you can find

This will instantly generate at least a few dozen good backlinks for you. A couple dozen backlinks isn’t anything to jump over joy for, but if you have a good (doesn’t even have to be great) design then it will get picked up and added to other design directories, blogs, forums, etc much like a link to a good article gets passed around. Of course the better the design the more backlinks you’ll most likely get from it.

Here is a list of some of the top CSS galleries I was able to find:

There are a ton more out there, but these should be a good start for you. I also found a nifty little tool that supposedly automatically submits your site to over 25 of the “most popular CSS showcases” – CSSInsert. I can’t vouch for how good this site is because frankly I’ve never used it until today, but if it works like it claims to, it will definately save you some leg work.

Well there you have it – my first little link building tip. Use this and you will certainly get some backlinks. I did this with my personal blog a couple of months ago and was able to generate over 3,000 backlinks in about a month’s time. It’s definately worth the minimal time and effort. This little tidbit is nothing ground-breaking, but in all honestly, is anything about SEO really groundbreaking? On second thought, maybe I’ll save that argument for another post.