Who is part of you community?

To optimize for Ask, you first have to determine what sites belong to your online community. Who are the experts? Which sites receive a lot of links from other relevant sites? Which sites have great lists of relevant sites in that community? You have to do the research and have a very clear map of your community. You can perform this research simply by typing your top keywords into ask.com and making a list of the sites that rank. Then, visit those sites and become familiar with the community. Take notes when you visit them, listing things such as, do they have a lot of links out to other sites in the community? Do they only have a few links out to other sites? How can I encourage them to link to me? Don’t forget to visit the sites that are related to yours by clicking on the keywords that appear under “refine” or “expand” your search on the right side of the SERP’s.

Then, you have to start establishing yourself in your community. Imagine you just moved to a new area and wanted to make friends. What would you do? You would bake your famous oatmeal cookies and go knock on the door of your neighbors to say hi and introduce yourself. Same with your website. You would visit established sites that belong to your community and ask them to mention you in their websites. Ideally, you have something unique to offer, something that other sites in your community don’t offer, this way they’ll be happy to link to you.

If you are offering a product, try to get other sites in your community to review your product. Pay them to post your review, or give htem your product for free. If you are competing in a competitive area, try to find a niche for yourself where you can establish your site as the “big fish” in a small pond.

Offer something unique

You will have an easier job getting listed on other sites from your community if you offer something unique that is not currently available in your community. Also, you may consider finding an incentive for other sites to link to you, like offering them a discount if they buy your products, giving them free advice if you’re an expert on something, or offering a free tool that they can add to their site with a link back to yours.

Finally, try to generate new content on a weekly basis. This advice is good for all search engines in general, and will also help you with Ask. This will also encourage people to link to you, as they see you are constantly developing content and are offering “value” to the community.

Conclusion

Once you have established yourself as an expert in your community, it’s important to continue building your reputation by getting other related sites to link to yours. Also, use keywords that belong to their “refine” or “expand” search feature, on the right hand side of the SERP’s, to get your site listed in those SERP’s to link to you. All the sites listed under those keywords belong to your community. If you continue growing your site, adding content, and getting links from other sites, you will see your rankings increase and stabilize in Ask.com

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