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Offering Free Web Resources for SEO Success

What do free web resources have to do with SEO success? How can you offer free tools and content as an SEO strategy to boost your website's search engine rankings?

These are the questions we will answer in this link building lesson.

The goal of SEO is to increase your website's ranking in the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Link popularity has a lot to do with this. The more websites that link to yours, the better your search engine rankings. Offering web resources through your website is an excellent way to build up your link popularity. Here's how to go about it.

What are Web Resources Anyway?

In the context of this article, a web resource is anything you offer through your website that your target audience would find useful. For example, my target audience consists of website owners who are trying to improve their online success through search engine optimization / SEO. So I've created this Learning Center to serve as a web resource for such people. And I've made it free to use, which is another important point (to be covered below).

Your web resources will obviously be different from mine. It all depends on your audience. But it will likely include helpful articles, tutorials, free downloads, tools, etc. To come up with resource ideas, you simply have to ask yourself: "What kind of web content would my target audience find useful?"

Why You Should Offer Free Resources

This strategy supports your online marketing program in two ways. For one thing, all of those free resources / content will keep people on your website longer. This will make them more likely to (A) trust you and (B) contact you about your products or services. But web-based resources help with link building as well. If you turn your website into a valuable destination, other webmasters will start to link to your site as a recommended resource for their own visitors.

With web directories and paid listings aside, few people will link to a "bare bones" website that offers nothing unique, helpful or interesting. On the other hand, if you build the kind of website that makes other in your industry or niche say, "Wow, that's really something! I know some folks who would like that," then your link building efforts will be a breeze.

The goal here is to create the kind of website that attracts links, citations and recommendations from other website owners and bloggers. Over time, this has snowball effect. As more and more webmasters link to your site, you will experience a steady increase search engine rankings. As that happens, more people will find your website ... and many of them will link to it as well.

Like I said, it's a snowball effect. But it all starts with having the kind of website that others would recommend, and that's where free web resources come into the picture. Why do you think I spend so much time building my SEO Learning Center? It's no secret!

Create an Authority Website, and Then Promote It

This link building / SEO strategy can work for any type of business. I know for a fact, because I have helped many of my clients create free resources for their websites. These clients ranged from real estate agents to software companies. The content and the resources varied from client to client, but the strategy was always the same — create a base of useful content around a certain topic or objective.

I once had a client in the medical field, and their website had dozens of quality articles scattered across it. These articles were all related to a certain subject (their practice). So I set out to gather and organize this helpful content into an online library for anyone researching the subject. In other words, I took a bunch of disorganized content and made a high-value web resource out of it.

Next, I devised a plan to use this free resource for link building purposes, with the end goal of increasing the client's website visibility and traffic. I made a list of websites that had similar information (though not as extensive). Then I emailed the site owners one at a time and pointed out the vast Resource Center on my client's website. I invited them to share it with their readers by linking to it however they saw fit.

Nearly half of them took me up on the offer, giving my client high-quality backlinks from relevant websites. This kind of network building is the brass ring of any SEO campaign, but none of it would have been possible if not for the free resources on my client's website.

Sure, it takes a lot of work to create web resources from scratch. But the results always justify the effort. In my experience, it's one of the best techniques for link building and SEO success.

Related item: More link-building strategies