Are You Missing These SEO Opportunities?

To improve your business website's ranking in the search engines, high-quality links from other websites are essential.

There are many ways to get these links. Some involve a lot of work and even money, but some are really simple. So simple you may be overlooking excellent SEO opportunities right under your nose.

Aside from getting backlinks, these opportunities can also bring traffic to your website. And this traffic would be warm visitors who are already interested in your content.

3 Unknown or Overlooked Backlinking Opps

1. YouTube

Many businesses nowadays have a YouTube channel, because after all, YouTube is now the second largest search engine, second only to Google.

But unless your YouTube videos are properly optimized, all the YouTube videos in the world won't do your business any good. If you submit your videos to other video sharing sites, such as Vimeo, many of the tips below apply as well.

To optimize your videos, do the following:

• Put your target keywords in your video title, description, and tags

• Write a keyword-rich and informative video description. This is your opportunity to use your secondary target keywords.

• Add hyperlinks. Did you know your video description can have clickable links to your website? Just type the entire URL, including “https://www.” and the text will be hyperlinked. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't let you use anchor text, but it's still a link back from a high-authority site.

• Write a relevant call to action in the video description, to bring viewers from YouTube to your website.

Here's an example of an optimized YouTube video description:

2. Flickr

Flickr is another high-authority site where you can build your own backlinks to your site.

The tips for optimizing your Flickr images are similar to videos:

• Use your target keyword in your photo title, description, and tags.

• Put links back to your website by creating hyperlinks in your photo description. Unlike YouTube, Flickr accepts HTML code in the description and comments sections, so use your target keyword as anchor text in your links.

See how I added hyperlinked anchor text in this Flickr description:

3. Blog syndication sites

Sites that automatically syndicate blog content are also good opportunities for SEO and traffic. Alltop is an example of a popular blog syndication site. It accepts blogs in various topics, and it wouldn't hurt to submit yours. However, even better for SEO are syndication sites that focus in your industry, because these links back to your blog are highly relevant.

Alltop doesn't give any opportunities for using anchor text. The best thing you could do with Alltop is make sure you choose the best topic or category for your blog.

Other syndication sites, however, actually allow you to write an author's bio or profile. Most will allow HTML coding, which means, once again, that you can use your target keywords as anchor text when linking back to your site.

Remember to have a call to action when linking to your site, to increase the chances of people actually clicking on the link.

This is how I optimized my author bio, which is automatically published every time my post is syndicated in this particular website:

The easiest way to use these opportunities is to build them into your blogging schedule. For example, the day after you blog, create a relevant video to upload to YouTube. The day after that, take a screenshot of something related to your blog post, and upload it to Flickr.

Do this every week and you'll be building a steady stream of backlinks back to your business website or blog.

How Are You Doing?

Are you currently taking advantage of these free backlinks from high-authority sites? What can you do today to stop missing out?

Or have I missed other SEO opportunities? If so, what?

photo credit: Max Klingensmith