So one thing many people ask themselves when starting out with SEO is how can I get backlinks? Backlinks are one of the most important things with SEO and some of the easiest things to get, especially if you already have a following or a venue to market in or are just very creative. Although there are a million ways to get them, one of my favorites and one of the very easiest is to create a badge or a reward or an icon for people’s sites and blogs.
Not only do people love getting to decorate things, but if you position it right or have them copy and paste the html, you can almost ensure that a bunch of them will turn into full fledged backlinks. The question though is why would anyone want my badge or what would the badge be for? Sounds like a good question so lets think about what badges are for.
Badges are given out for winning competitions, for being selected to speak at conferences, when you attend a rally or want to support a cause. They come in the forms of ribbons, images, awards, banners, interactive scripts, etc… People love these because it not only gets to show what they believe in or that they achieved something, but when their friends see that they’ve won something, some of the time the friends want to compete with them so they may go and try to win or get the same badge their friends have which in turn gives you another opportunity for another backlink. So what can I do to get to give out a badge and who is currently doing this?
Conferences.
If you look at company blogs, most of the time you’ll see little badges saying I’m speaking at “insert conference name here”. Because they were selected to speak they want to show it off to not only get their fans or followers to attend their Sessions, but also because it adds more credibility to their company and to them. (I still have to post my Affiliate Summit, PubCon, and USPS badges for this fall). With those badges in place many of us keep the links in tact so that when the people who visit our sites or read our blogs see where we are speaking, we want them to be able to go through the badge to find the conference website and sign up so that we can meet them in person and hopefully get a new client as well. It also helps to ensure that we really exist to our readers which is a key ingredient to building readership and loyalty.
Gaming Companies.
These are some of the most popular badges out there. Gaming companies use badges to not only get backlinks but to also get the winner’s friends to find the badge and sign up so they can get a new customer. They give badges out for scoring a ton of points, for getting to the top level of a game, for being the best at a particular thing in their game, etc… Not only do the badges make the person feel proud, but it also reminds them to keep coming back to play again which gives the game owner more eyeballs and opens them up to even more revenue.
Pop Culture and Content Sites.
Pop Culture and Content Sites are famous for their quizes. You have fashion quizes, celebrity quizes, which character are you most like quizes and everything in between. When you take a quiz, especially one that involves thinking or education, many people want to share it because they are proud of how they scored and want to show off. A lot of the time they take these winnings and post it to their facebook or other social media sites as well as their own blogs. Not only does this badge give you more exposure, but the backlinks and social aspects give you some serious exposure if done correctly. The one thing I don’t see often enough and would love to see more frequently are these quiz companies sending out interactive quiz badges where the visitors on blogs, etc… can take the quick from their site directly. Not only will this be a back link but you can serve an ad on another site, get additional exposure and at the end allow them to visit your site via the quiz or allow them to get a copy of it for their own sites. Interactive banners are awesome and I wish more sites would see the value in using them for quizes and see the value in how you can distribute them. The Webmasters and Bloggers may also like them if they don’t have a script to get the person to leave because they not only get fresh content and quizzes for their readers so they keep coming back, but they also can keep the reader on their site increasing their exposure and possible loyalty since the website visitor never has to leave.
There are a million more ways that you can use and distribute badges for SEO and to increase loyalty and traffic but unfortunately I have to head out to go meet with a potential Client (wish me luck) so if you’d like to add to how you can use a badge for SEO, Backlinks and additional eyeballs, please feel free to leave a comment below. If you found this post useful or think other people might, please feel free to tweet it by using the tweet button at the top. Thanks again for reading my blog and let me know if you are attending any of the shows I am speaking at.
