Web Site SEO: Building Strong Links
Do yourself a favor: Link
I often get customers asking me to perform Search Engine Optimization on their site. While I don’t necessarily consider myself an expert on the subject, I certainly understand its importance and can provide significant input into making your site as search engine friendly as possible.
One of the things, however, that seems to put customers into a tailspin is when I talk to them of the importance of having inbound links to their sites. Inbound links, basically, are other web sites that link to you because you have something important that they think their visitors will find useful. If people like your content and/or the services you offer enough to link to you, their enthusiasm can lead to good things for your web site and strategy.
What do I need those links for?
Search engines use a web site’s inbound links as part of a formula to determine their relevance to keywords that the average person would use in a search. Interestingly, I can’t say that more is better, either. The quality of the site linking to you also has a direct impact on how your site is judged by search engines.
Let’s say you have a coffee house in a local town, and your coffee house has a web site. We’ll assume, for the moment, that you followed the guidelines we highlighted in “Building a Meaningful Web Site for Your Business” and you’ve already got a steady flow of visitors to your web site who also frequent your shop. You join a conglomerate of coffee shops in the area that have decided to do a link exchange in order to promote each others’ business on the web, and you’re all about the same size.
The link exchange causes your relevance to go up because other coffee houses are linking to your site, and you’re helping your comrades out by building their relevance. But the impact of that link exchange is small because you’re all relatively unknown in the grand scheme of things. If someone were to search for “coffee shop” you would likely be buried very deep in the search engine results, though you’d probably be better off than if you were on your own.
Now, let’s say you started brewing and carrying Starbucks coffee in addition to your own blend, and they decided to link to your site (unlikely, I know, but work with me here). Since Starbucks is nationally known and has a high relevance in search engine rankings, their one link would boost your search engine relevance more than all of the other coffee shops in your conglomerate combined. And because you like to all those other coffee shops, you end up helping them out too because of your boost (though not as much as Starbucks helped you!).
And that is basically how search engine relevance works, and why it’s important for you not only to get links, but quality links to your site.
So are you ready to get started?
Linking using social media
You won’t score high on the search engines for having your web site linked on all the social media sites, but you will give people more ways to find you, and that will give you a boost in terms of popularity. LinkedIn, Facebook, MerchantCircle, and others will give you the opportunity to post your personal and/or business links on your profile, and will allow people to get to know you more directly. If you publish a regular blog, you can also use these sites to post links to articles you’re publishing. I actually just started using LinkedIn Groups to post links to articles that I think might be relevant to other members in my groups, and I’ve noticed a significant increase in my number of visitors, though my search engine ranking stayed about the same.
Ultimately, every little bit helps, and being more personal helps draw customers if not necessarily relevance. If you want to know a little more about using social media to help you get your message out there, check out “Using Social Media to Spread Your Message,” last week’s post.
Directories
Directories like Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ (an open source business directory) will give your relevance a boost for search engines, though most directories will cost you money to have your business listed there. You may not necessarily use a business listing for searches, or for that matter you may not even know somebody who does anymore, but the difference between a business listing service and a search engine is that each entry in a business listing is reviewed by a human before being accepted.
If search engines find you on a business listing site, they’re programmed to think something like ,”hey, this person spent the time and money to get listed here, and then their business website was accepted by the person reviewing the application. At least I know their site isn’t total junk…give them a better ranking!”
If you want, there’s a good blog post about this very topic here, at a company called Blogspot.
Pounding the pavement
Sometimes just asking other businesses or even other people to link to you will serve to boost your ranking. Remember that conglomeration of coffee shops? Having that network of links is useful because if one hits it big, the others would benefit with a boosted relevance. Another way to partner would be to find other businesses that share common clients. If you’re selling a nutritional supplement, for example, ask local gyms for a link to your site on theirs, or even an opportunity to showcase your wares in person one or two nights while promoting your site. Joining appropriate organizations, such as chambers of commerce or other networking groups, and having your business listed on their web site is another good way to boost your ranking through links.
The more walking and linking you do, the better your search engine results will be. Be sure and target one or two big associates, clients or partners to which you can be linked. If they have better search engine relevance, it will help you in the long run. It may be harder to convince them to help you, but the harder the work, the better the payoff.
Things to avoid
- If anyone promises to put you up on a link farm or a high rank within a short period of time then run the other way. You want your links to be about quality, not quantity.
- Don’t use social sites just as a promotional tool. People will turn you off as “noise” pretty quickly, they won’t follow your links, and search engines will immediately recognize the drop in popularity. Be social.
- Don’t build relationships just for the link. Maintaining the relationship is more important than the link itself. In the case of a link exchange, consider it a referral; someone that knows you thinks highly enough of you that they want to direct some of their web site traffic to your site.
There are other things out there to avoid, but those are biggies. As long as you’re considering the personal relationship behind the link, you should be fine.
Patience is a virtue
Don’t walk into this with the expectation that your site will suddenly jump to #1 in all of your keyword searches across all of the popular search engines overnight. Linking takes time and energy. If you’ve got a new web site, it could take up to a month before search engines even crawl your site, and more time still before they have it properly indexed. But doing this homework beforehand will put you ahead of the game, especially if you hire a consultant later to come in and help improve on the work you’ve already done.
Resources
By no means is the information here complete (that’s why they do books on SEO alone), but it should provide a starting point for you in terms of Search Engine Optimization overall and linking in particular. And here are a couple of other resources you should check out:
Website Grader - This is such a good resource for those of you wanting to just check out how your web site does in terms of SEO. Do not necessarily go there and expect to get high marks immediately. As I mentioned, patience is a virtue, and if you can score above 30 as a relatively small business without a blog, then you’re doing halfway decent. If you have a blog, you should probably score 50 or more, depending on the age and setup of your site. If you are scoring lower than that with a blog, then your site either isn’t optimized enough, or you aren’t updating your blog enough.
Blog Carnivals – If you blog, you need to submit your best articles to a Blog Carnival. Basically, it is a collection of blogs that on a regular basis (once a week, monthly, etc.) will put up a post that consists of nothing but links to other blog articles. As a person submitting a blog post, you get exposure to an audience of people that may not ever have found your site under other circumstances. If you host, you can provide some good reading material from other sources for your visitors.
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(Please note, unless this is a review on a specific book, I have not necessarily read the books I list for further reading. I simply look for related books on amazon and put them here for your convenience.)
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Comments
Very informative article about the usefulness of Inbound Links…
I really liked the point of having presence in community sites. “LinkedIn, Facebook, MerchantCircle, and others will give you the opportunity to post your personal and/or business links on your profile, and will allow people to get to know you more directly.”. It really helps in improving your presence and bringing good and related traffic to your website.
Good work.
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I think you’ve got this spot-on Mariano.
Often clients have a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude to sites. It’s hard to persuade them that building a site is *just the beginning*!
If the client isn’t very ‘web-savvy’ it often helps to use a metaphor. The one I use most often is: ‘You wouldn’t print 10,000 brochures and leave them piled in a warehouse – that’s what you’re doing if you don’t promote your site.’