There has been much said about building links this year and we thought it would be a good idea to give you a quick and simple technique to help your search engine optimisation process and give your staff a Xmas present. You are a great boss after all! 
Solution
Simply ask all your staff who has a blog and ask your staff if they would consider placing a footer link in their blog that is keyword rich to your site. In return every year you will pay for the hosting fees for their blog on their own domain, if they are not hosting on their own domain name offer to pay for the domain name registration as well. This could make a great little Xmas present to your staff every year, but it is best get them something else as well!
Important
You should make it perfectly clear that the ownership of the blog is 100% theirs regardless of the hosting or domain name fees you will pay. Offer to sign a contract stating that you (your business) are not entitled to ownership of the blog or part there of regardless of the fees that are being paid. This may help them be comfortable with the idea.
One Step Further
After you have set up an army of bloggers within your business offer to allocate a set amount of time each week for them to blog during work hours. See some of the possible benefits below of implementing this.
Benefits
You will be cool boss because:
- you give your staff time to blog during work, saves them time after work as well.
- gives them a break from their everyday task
- re stimulates the minds of your employees and generates creativity
- employees are happier creating a happier working environment
- creativity in employees flows over into the work place increasing productivity and enthusiasm for their job and work place
- Customers have a better experience with your employees because they are happier
- YOU BUILD KEYWORD RICH LINKS that help your online marketing campaigns.
Advanced Option
If your staff are willing to do this it would be very beneficial to your search rankings.
When adding the keyword links to your employees blogs, change the location of the H1 HTML tags on the blog template and the individual page template to be surrounding the keyword link to the business site in the footer. You will need to change the CSS for the H1 tag so the links blends in and is not RIGHT IN YOUR FACE!
Optional
If you end up with a few bloggers for your cause, it would be a good idea to allocate pages for certain employees to link to.
For example, Blogger Employee 1 links to home page, Blogger Employee 2 links to sub page 1, Blogger Employee 3 links to sub page 2 etc.
Negative Xmas Elf Read This First!
For those of you that don’t think this will work, why not try it out first.
Let us know the results or you could just send us a Xmas present now because we think you will be shocked at the response in the work place and in the search engines.
So what are you waiting for?
I have read a lot of other blogs mention that footer links are being devalued and was a little scared to try this but I did anyway.
I used my hobby blog first as an experiment and noticed a jump in search results for a keyword phrase within 10 days. I was pretty excited about the results so have started talking to staff to see if they are interested in following your model.
Thanks for the idea.
Greg
Hi Greg,
Thanks for reading our blog and leaving a comment!
You are right, it is rumored that footer links might be dropping in value. But consider this, even if the footer link is only given half the value of a normal link, it is 10 times+ easier to write a short blog post and get a link at the same time compared to alternative link building methods.
We are not saying to forget about looking for other link possibilities at all, it is highly recommended that you try and get as much love as possible from different parts of the online world as possible.
We are just saying that even with a lower value link from the footer of a blog is more beneficial compared to no link at all!
Good luck with the rest of your link building and search engine optimisation strategies, feel free to ask any questions you might need answered!
Cheers
Brad
I thought if the link didn’t match the surrounding text that the link was considered spam and the site that contains the link got banned.
A link surrounded by related text will have a higher value given to the link. This is because it is seen to more of a natural link, eg, someone has written an article about a specific subject and used anchor text that is related to the article and the destination page as the link.
If a link is not surrounded by text, it is still a link, just not as valuable as the above example.
A site will only get banned or penalised if the Google gods see excessive outbound links, making the site look like a link farm. On this point it is a good idea to know how to use the “no follow” attribute.
If you have any questions please drop us a comment.