You have probably heard that having links pointed back to your website is good for your search engine optimization. This is very true.
If you are marketing from a website, the more links there are pointing to your website, the more popular it appears to be to the search engines. Think of this as a kind of ‘popularity contest’.
The search engines rely on popularity to help determine how valuable your site is to potential searchers. Although this is not the only criteria the search engines use, this is an important factor in your overall online marketing approach.
It goes like this: search engines are delivering a product to their customers, and that product is search results. The search engines know that you are looking for the most relevant sites possible, and they know, too, that people who find sites to be particularly relevant, they like to link to them. Search engines track the number of links there are to any given website, and use this information to help determine where to place the site in the search rankings to give their customers the most relevant sites to choose from. A site that has more links is deemed more valuable to searchers, and is therefore given a higher priority than a site that has fewer links.
To be clear; this is not the ONLY way a search engine grades a site, and there are certainly cases where more links gets trumped by some other data point. Nevertheless; links are important and it makes sense to build as many quality links as you can.
So, how to build links? There are a couple ways to get you started:
- Make comments on blogs. Find blogs that discuss your market topic and get involved. Make comments on their posts as often as you can. Most blog sites will allow you to add your URL to the comment. If they don’t, move on. When you do make comments, make sure they are thoughtful and that they contribute to the conversation; you don’t want to be seen as an annoyance.
- Get involved in forum discussions. Forums are a great place to get involved with other birds of a feather, and allow you to make successive comments. In most cases, you can include your URL in each of your comments. Again, make sure you are contributing to the conversation and building your credibility with valid comments. Don’t get into arguments, and try to avoid being critical of other people in the forum. Basically: Play nice in the sandbox.
- Post news to free news sites. Whenever you post content to your blog, make sure you are taking advantage of opportunities to repost your content. There are a number of free sites out there that allow you to post your news and articles. For news, simply do a search for ‘Free News Posting‘ to find a list of sites that allow you to post for free. For regular articles, use sites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Delicious.com and even Facebook and Twitter.
Note that all of these sites are free. All it takes is a little elbow grease and your site will begin to shine.
A final point: Make sure you choose your sites carefully. As a popularity contest, your reputation is built on the reputation of the sites from which you are linked. The more popular the site, the better. Like being a good friend of the most popular kid in school, you get some of the credibility from the leading sites. Conversely, links from bad sites known for spam or suspicious practices will tend to hurt your site. So be selective.
Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Tags: Building Links, copywriting, listpipe, seo
