You have possibly heard that search engines like to see links and many of them to a website, it helps to indicate which sites the search engine should list, as a link to a site is a bit like a vote for a site. That’s a valid point as, spammers networks aside, websites do tend to link to other sites that are interesting to the first sites readers.
If you are a small business owner with a website how do you go about building links to your website? There are many ways to get links but it is important to know that all links are not the same, some are much more powerful than others. A single link from an authority site in your industry can be worth dozens (maybe even hundreds) of links from other sites.
The best links to get are links that are composed of your target keywords as the anchor text (the clickable words on the other site) and they come from relevant sites in your industry or sites that are otherwise influential. (A link from The NY Times to your book-keeping website would be choice even if it is not related to your business!)
Some practical ways to get links to your website:
Firstly, you need to have decent content, whether this be in a blog or traditional style website, give potential link sources something good to link to before you try to get it linked to:
- Give it a mention in your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc accounts.
- Leave links where appropriate in relevant forums and comment in blogs that allow it.
- Bookmark it at the social bookmark sites like Digg and Delicious.
- Submit a shorter version to Ezinearticles or GoArticles with a link to the main article on your site of course.
- Blog it anywhere you got a blog.
See if your suppliers will link to you and try getting links from appropriate associations of professionals.
See if you ca do a deal with a similar service in another city, a mention and link to them from a blog article of yours in return for a similar mention from them of your website.
Find out who links to your competitors and try to get links from those sites too. You can check your competitor links by typing the following string into your browser location bar:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:somedomain.com%20-site:somedomain.com
Remember to replace the two ‘somedomain.com’ bits in that string with the domain you are checking.
Are there directories that specialize in your particular field? Prominent bloggers? – Try to get links from them or a product review (with a link to your site obviously).
See if you can guest post in those industry blogs with a link or two to your site of course.
Often even unrelated websites are useful, local directories help to get your name out there have a little link juice and they are good citation references if you are hoping to get a Google Local Business listing (more about that another time…).
If you can write an article on your industry you could also try publishing it on article directories or on social media websites like Hubpages.com. Remember to include a link back to your site of course! Better still, write a few articles and spread them around several article directories like Goarticles.com and Ezinearticles.com and some social sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. Interlink them a little and make sure they all have links to your main site.
Got a blog section with an RSS feed on your site? Add the RSS feed to the various RSS distribution services like feedage.com and feedagg.com.
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