Link development with free templates
Every now and then i would bump into a very talented designer who knows nothing about marketing nor seo. Ironically half the time they would be sitting on a PR7 website with bucket loads of organic traffic. How is this possible? Basically everyone wants a piece of their design. Every time they release a free template tons of people download it and because each template contains a backlink in the footer, designer gets some nice linky goodness back. Now there is a reason why so many people use their designs. Because these designers can produce amazing templates. So how could an average (Not so talented) person like me and you could get a piece of the action? You may think its impossible… But you would be wrong.
Me for example. I’m a very average designer (You can have a look at some of my work in progress at Impera Victoria). There are tons of people who are much better than me. How am i suppose to compete?
1) Find an open source script that lacks free templates. For example Pligg. When there is little choice of templates your design does not have to be great to get popular. You can then either design a template yourself or hire someone to do this for you. Try here. There are tons of people you can hire to design you a quick theme. (You might want to make sure that the footer in encrypted, making it harder to remove your link)
2) Share your template on script home forum and related sites.
3) Sit back and enjoy a stream of backlinks.
Case-study:
This is exactly what i did. I found a free template i liked. I then contacted a guy who designed it and asked if i could port it for Pligg. When he gave me green light i spent a few hours porting that theme. I then started a new thread on Pligg giving away the final product. This template has only been up for grabs for 2 weeks until a new version of Pligg came out making it out of date. During that time i have managed to accumulate over 1000 backlinks (Sitewide)
So remember… When people don’t have much choice, your themes don’t have to be amazingly good.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:17 am
A while ago, Google was penalizing designers who gave out free blog templates on the stand that such link building method is not fair, which did not make any sense to me.
Even though a template might seem to be simple, it will be used no matter what by some as more and more simple blogs, content leeching blogs and MFA sites are being produced day after day and most of these webmasters will be using a free template irregardless of the design.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Great advice! My suggestion is to have the designer create templates that are related to your site/page in which you have your link. Likely, the user of the template will write about a topic that the theme is meant. Such as a motorcyle theme will often be used by a motorcycle enthusiast, linking to your motorcycle site in the footer. Nice!
March 12th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. I think I’m one of those designers who knows at least something about SEO (I hope), as I’m using my templates to build links for my sites too.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Wayne Liew
Throuble with wordpress, it is way too saturated with templates.
SW
Exactly! You need targeted/related links.
andrej
Good luck!
March 16th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Wayne: I can see how Google could say it was unfair. I may even agree with them, alhough I think this is a great idea and something that I will consider.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Shall, i remove the link from the templates which i had downloaded from free templates websites?
June 17th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
First of all it is often against the license agreement to remove the links. Secondly by keeping the link you are supporting the designer and saying thank you for his hard work. Finally, it does not have any negative impact on your website. If everyone started to remove these links you would not see as many great and most importantly free designs in the future.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
2 months ago I went onto Digital point forum and sponsor 2 templates that is related to my niche. I put anchor text that are targeted keywords toward my sponsor websites and I just see some results right now. The keywords I targeted actually move up a few pages on Google. This is a good SEO method, just need a lot of patient.