In the world of SEO, links are a good way to improve your organic visibility. Many have heard about link building, but aren’t eager to follow through with the steps. However, link building doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, it can actually be fun if looked at from the right perspective. Since Spring is upon us, let’s look at how your company can begin link building or tidy up and improve the links that are currently in place.
When many people think of links, they think of outbound links. Outbound links are links on your website that direct a visitor to another website. Some tend to think that outbound links will cause a site to lose visitors. On the other hand, if links are treated like Macy’s treated Gimbels on the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, then the return of visitors may be greater than expected. One way to increase outbound links is to think of the current alliances and partnerships that your business possess. Reach out to contacts at those businesses and let them know that your company is sending outbound links their way. They may even be kind enough to return the favor and both companies win.
Another winning link strategy is internal links. Sometimes, internal links aren’t given the same hype as outbound and inbound links, but they are very efficient. Internal links can be used to direct visitors to more detailed pages within your site. For example: Let’s say your company sells vacation plans, and the special for the month is a discounted trip to Hawaii. On the company web site are blogs about different destinations and their benefits. It would be a good idea to have an internal link on the Hawaii vacation plan page that directs a visitor to the Hawaii blog. This way, the visitor is learning more about Hawaii and its pleasures and is more likely to purchase a Hawaii vacation plan from your company. One note that should be adhered to is that inbound links should make sense. Don’t just create an inbound link for the sake of having an inbound link; otherwise it could frustrate your visitors. Inbound links should be relevant to visitors, and at the same time provide quality SEO value to your web site.
Another valuable way to improve linking is to think outside of the box. Is your company having a Facebook contest or promotion? How about creating an outbound link that directs visitors to that contest or promotion? Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing. This isn’t a task that your company should do everyday, but rather every 6 months or so. Learn from your competitor’s accomplishments and avoid their downfalls.
Link building doesn’t have to be an arduous task. In fact, it may prove more entertaining and valuable than your company thought. Outbound links and internal links are a true benefit and can help your company’s SEO efforts. As your company looks to improve its site, remember the 3 “Linkability” tips above. To learn more about linking, read our white paper called “Link Building Made Easy: What to Do When You Run Out of Fresh Ideas.”
In the world of SEO, links are a good way to improve your organic visibility. Many have heard about link building, but aren’t eager to follow through with the steps. However, link building doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, it can actually be fun if looked at from the right perspective. Since Spring is upon us, let’s look at how your company can begin link building or tidy up and improve the links that are currently in place.
When many people think of links, they think of outbound links. Outbound links are links on your website that direct a visitor to another website. Some tend to think that outbound links will cause a site to lose visitors. On the other hand, if links are treated like Macy’s treated Gimbels on the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, then the return of visitors may be greater than expected. One way to increase outbound links is to think of the current alliances and partnerships that your business possess. Reach out to contacts at those businesses and let them know that your company is sending outbound links their way. They may even be kind enough to return the favor and both companies win.
Another winning link strategy is internal links. Sometimes, internal links aren’t given the same hype as outbound and inbound links, but they are very efficient. Internal links can be used to direct visitors to more detailed pages within your site. For example: Let’s say your company sells vacation plans, and the special for the month is a discounted trip to Hawaii. On the company web site are blogs about different destinations and their benefits. It would be a good idea to have an internal link on the Hawaii vacation plan page that directs a visitor to the Hawaii blog. This way, the visitor is learning more about Hawaii and its pleasures and is more likely to purchase a Hawaii vacation plan from your company. One note that should be adhered to is that inbound links should make sense. Don’t just create an inbound link for the sake of having an inbound link; otherwise it could frustrate your visitors. Inbound links should be relevant to visitors, and at the same time provide quality SEO value to your web site.
Another valuable way to improve linking is to think outside of the box. Is your company having a Facebook contest or promotion? How about creating an outbound link that directs visitors to that contest or promotion? Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing. This isn’t a task that your company should do everyday, but rather every 6 months or so. Learn from your competitor’s accomplishments and avoid their downfalls.
Link building doesn’t have to be an arduous task. In fact, it may prove more entertaining and valuable than your company thought. Outbound links and internal links are a true benefit and can help your company’s SEO efforts. As your company looks to improve its site, remember the 3 “Linkability” tips above. To learn more about linking, read our white paper called “Link Building Made Easy: What to Do When You Run Out of Fresh Ideas.”
Inbound links or “backlinks” (links pointing to your website from another one) can have great benefit in terms of both ranking AND indexing of your site. For instance, more links pointing to you emanating from a site that also has a lot of links will contribute to your site’s PageRank (A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself). This will sometimes aid the website in ranking higher for particular keywords. Also, the PageRank number (a scale of 0-10) is proportional to the amount of pages Google decides to crawl and then index. The benefits are really two fold.
Getting backlinks is not that easy, however. You must be proactive and attempt to garner new linking opportunities as often as possible. Granted, the better the content on the site, the more people who will want to naturally link to you, but that is only two thirds of the battle. Having a great website with great content does not mean that you will move from position 30 to position number 1 without getting your name out there and alerting other webmasters to your presence.
You also need specific types of links. The general consensus used to be that any link from a “.edu” or a “.gov” domain will automatically award your site great rankings, but the Google algorithm is savvy to this and Google is now specifically looking at the relevance of the website linking to you and how much of a “hub” site or authority it really is.
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