My job as an Internet Marketing Consultant requires me to be constantly learning and staying up on trends so that I can provide the best information to help businesses get more clients. Sometimes, I think too hard about how to present the information so that you as a business professional can quickly and easily understand it. As is the case with the topic of link building. One thing I’m learning is to not reinvent the wheel, but instead utilize what I’m learning from others in the internet marketing industry. One trusted source that I use as a resource often is SEO Moz, a SEO software company, so I’ve decided to describe link building using their words:
“For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways.”
Search Engines use links coming into your site and links going out of your site to evaluate which pages are important and popular. The more popular a website is, the more credibility it will hold. Another way to think of it is this: Links from other sites are like votes or endorsements. If you’re campaigning for an office you will have more authority and credibility if you get the support from the respected big guys, right? In the same way, you want to link to websites that are well known and trusted leaders in the industry and have been around awhile. These are called “authoritative links” because they add credibility to your site. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trustworthy sites, letting the search engines know that your website is legit and offers good information about a subject. If the search engines trust you they will give you a higher ranking in the search results, which helps people find you easier, sending traffic to your website, and hopefully that traffic turns into leads. Of course, it’s important to remember that link building is just one component of an internet marketing strategy, but it is an important part.
So, how do you build links? You need a strategy, which always starts with setting goals. The challenging thing about link building is that it’s hard to measure because we don’t know exactly how the search engines weigh the importance of each link. What we do know, is that they do weigh each link and they do it using precise, mathematical metrics that’s impossible for anyone to really pinpoint. Still, there are multiple effective ways to use internet marketing for your link building campaign. For example:
- Ask your loyal customers or vendors you partner with to link back to your site using partnership badges. It’s sort of like they are sticking your bumper sticker on their site.
- Start writing a blog for your company. Make sure it’s educational and entertaining. This will help give you fresh content consistently, the ability to participate in conversations across the web, and earn links from other blogs.
- Create “link bait.” This is a SEO term for content that causes viral sharing. It’s usually newsworthy and uses humor to create the viral effect. For example, companies making their own Harlem Shake videos, giving something away for free, or stating their opinion about a controversial topic.
- Find directories or listings that use the search engines themselves to find lists of pages that offer outbound links. Be careful with this one though, links that are easy to get sometimes aren’t always the best.
- Stay away from buying links. Any kind of link buying scheme that seems too good to be true probably is, and the search engines spend a lot of time and resources into detecting link buying strategies.
This is only scratching the service. There are many more components to consider for an effective link building strategy, but hopefully you have a better understanding of what link building is. As an Internet Marketing Consultant, I’m continuing to learn, along with my peers, to use the signals from the search engines to adjust our strategies at any given time so we can help our clients use their websites to gain traction, traffic and get more customers.
What type of strategy mentioned above do you think would be most beneficial for your business?
