Building Links
Get links back to your site from relevant and authoritative sites.
Linking is really about increasing your footprint on the World Wide Web. The search engines will look to see how many sites link to you and the quality of those sites. This helps them determine where to list you in the search results. The more relevant links you have coming to your site, the better. Think of the search engines like the judges at a highschool dance – each vote you get betters your chance of winning. It’s like a popularity contest, a link popularity contest!
Besides helping your popularity, links will bring you more traffic. Links from high traffic sites will influence your site in the eyes of the search engines. They will say, hey, this site must be important since high traffic guy is linking to them.
Be sure sites linking to you are relative to what you do or sell, or relative to your local area. Local businesses can get links from other businesses nearby, as well as from sites that complement your products or services. Stay away from any links that are not related to what you do or sell (nearby local business are the only exception). The search engines may view this attempt by you to be spammy thinking you’re stuffing your site with links just for the sake of links. They will count this against you in a negative way, which you definitely don’t want.
Other ways to get links
- If you are a member of a trade or industry association, see if you can be listed in their business directory. Most will have a place for members to include information about their business along with a site link.
- You can do some reciprocal linking with complementary (not competitor) sites. Since reciprocal linking doesn’t carry much weight with the search engines, don’t spend too much time on this. Look for sites that have about the same amount of traffic as you and are high quality sites.The search engines are looking for the quality of the sites that link to you.
You may be asked to exchange with other sites in your industry. Do so in a small area/separate page of your site. After all, you don’t want to be sending traffic away from your site as soon as they arrive. If you initiate the link exchange, do so personally. Don’t send an automated email. Everyone is busy and won’t be inclined to reply to something that looks spammy. You’ll just be wasting your time.
- If your blog is hosted on your own domain, you can list it in a few blog directories. If you’re using a third-party platform for blogging, like WordPress, Typepad or Blogger, you can link to your site from your blog and vice versa.
- If you have newsworthy information, you can submit a press release either online or with your local online newspaper. Be sure it contains a link back to your site. Links on news sites tend to remain for long periods of time so this can provide some longevity for your link building efforts.
Traditional methods of advertising and promoting are still effective. If they work for your industry, by all means, use a mixed media approach.
