SEO Badge Update
One of the best case studies of how a SEO badge can give your site a tremoundous boost to your link building campaign is Yelp.com. Back in the 2008, SEOMOZ worked with Yelp to drive more organic traffic. They had suggested SEO badges that would be given out to the service providers. Within these badges were three links back into Yelp. As you can see from the screenshot below the big jump in backlinks (links that point back into a website) this tactic really worked! Just another example of the power of the SEO link building badge!
Link Building With Badges
As you know we talk a lot about link building here for a bunch of reasons. Developing a solid inbound link building strategy is very time consuming and will not give you that overnight success we all look for in our SEO efforts but the more link building tactics we use the better chance our success rate will be. I want to talk about using a homemade badge to help build link popularity to your site.
Let assume you have a B2C or B2B site. I am going to use Yellow Bear Shop.com (YBS). This site is owned by Julie, one of our readers of my blog. YSB is a site that specializes in gifts for babies and has thousands of products to choose from. Let’s leverage customers from YSB to help drive link popularity into the site.
Our SEO Badge Process
First of all we need to create a set of badges for the B2C side and the B2B side. So we have created “Preferred Shopper” and “Preferred Partner” badges that available for anybody who has a website to display. Now the challenge is how do you get consumers and businesses to display your badges? I would offer an exclusive incentive such as free shipping or a small discount as I feel this will satisfy the “what’s in it for me” syndrome. Yes, some might display your badge without a need for something in return but I do feel this will really lift your usage of others displaying the badge and thus increasing your inbound links and showcases that you have good relationships with your customers/partners, which is very important for search engines to see and “realize” your network growing.
SEO Badge Design Tip
I would also suggest you design your badges in CSS as image replacement as this will allow you to use anchor text in the badge which is very important in your link building strategy. Be careful to use only the words that describe your badges in that anchor text as you do not want to show the search engines anything that they would consider SPAM.
[...] Search engine marketing professionals need to be very creative in producing content that people feel compelled to link to. Ultimately the success of your link building efforts depends on being able to promote that content in such a way that gets it noticed by those who have self-interest in telling others about it with the ultimate gift of appreciation for your content, a quality link back to your site. This means that any search engine marketer must focus on building relationships with the people who manage authoritative sites and have the power to link to you. [...]