Can You List Ten Reasons Why Other Sites Should Link to Yours?

In today’s ClickZ article, “Let’s Talk About Links,” SEO expert Mike Grehan talks about non-paid links versus paid links.

If you’ve been following the story, Google did a smack down last month of sites that rely on paid links to boost rankings. A number of sites were penalized.

In the article Grehan writes:

One thing I do with new clients is sit them down in front of their Web sites and ask them to write down 10 reasons someone should link to them. Rarely do people get past seven or eight.

It’s a short exercise intended, in the main, to get the client thinking about not just differentiation but also the actual business model. Face it: if you can’t think of dozens of reasons people would want to link to your site, you may want to ask yourself why you built it in the first place.

He asks a good question so I decided to take his challenge. Here are 10 reasons why I think people should link to my site — www.dhcommunications.com:

1. I have a a full list of B2B marketing articles to which many site owners have linked.

2. Ditto for the archived e-newsletters I have on my site.

3. I offer free reports to which other site owners can and do link.

4. I offer paid content (i.e. e-books) to which some sites and bloggers do link.

5. I offer site visitors links to sites they might find of interest, which in turn helps generate links back to my site.

6. I write lots of articles for other sites — which gives me yet more links to my site.

7. I work with people who have complementary services; sometimes they will link to my site in order to offer my services as a resource to their clients.

8. I write a blog. When someone comments on my posts, they sometimes link to my Website and my blog.

9. I’ve had other sites review my e-newsletter and then provide their readers links to it and my site.

10. Because of all the content on my site, I get calls from journalists for interviews, which in turn leads to more inbound links when the articles go live.

What do you think? Are these valid reasons for people to link to my site? Can you think of any I missed?

For the record, I have over 1200 inbound links (according to Yahoo’s Site Explorer). I’ve built these links over time and have not paid for any of them.

(Thanks, Mike! This was a worthwhile exercise.)