Source: http://searchengineland.com/3-practical-local-link-building-ideas-will-cure-penguinitis-245740
Local businesses have become wary of link building since the release of Penguin update. The once-easy and inexpensive link-building tactics that were popular to small businesses have become worthless, but there are still plenty of white-hat methods that can greatly help local businesses in garnering link.
Waays to revover from Penguinitis
If you are currently recovering from Penguinitis, here are three of Mike Ramsey’s most practical link-building ideas that can help.
Alumni directories or association links
For business owners, partners or key executives that attended the local or state university, gathering highly authoritative links back to your site can be done through their alumni directories.
Not to mention .edu links are quite strong, alumni associations also sometimes share news and current events from alumni. This type of link building will be worth investigating for practitioner businesses such as lawyers, realtors and doctors.
Existing brand mentions
With the help of tools like Google News alerts for brand mentions, although local PR coverage often doesn’t include a backlinks to the business site, you can simply request for the authors who have written about your brand online to include one. With Google News alerts, you can easily monitor and identify these opportunities.
Industry-specific local directories
The benefits of industry-specific directory listings are great because of their high authority and well reinforced signals to Google regarding business category, products and services. The more locally specific sites you can leverage, the clearer it will be to Google how relevant your business is for local searchers.
