Linking with other businesses in the web is one important way to promote your business. The good news is that it is (or should be) free; the not so good news is that it takes time to do proper link-building. The key thing to remember is that it is essential to driving traffic to your site. So to optimize your website for search engines there is no question that you should be seeking out linking opportunities, both inbound and outbound. We will focus on inbound links at this point.
Why Is Linking Important?
Search engines use a number of factors, both internal and external to your site, in order to rank your site accurately. Remember that they are looking to provide results that are relevant to the search term of the user and also that are from reliable, trustworthy sources who are an authority in their subject matter, who produce quality content, and who are reputable. Linking speaks to this last point – reputability. One of the ways that search engines gauge your reputation is by looking at which resources are linking in to your website. Inbound links from other websites will tell search engines how important people consider your content to be.
High quality inbound links, therefore, are ones with the following qualities:
- The website linking in to yours is highly relevant to the topic of your website
- The website linking in to yours has a high Page Rank or PR (Google’s relative ranking of all web pages)
- The inbound link is a one way link (i.e., you’re not reciprocating with an outgoing link to their website)
How Do You Start A Linking Strategy?
The ideal links are from sources such as publications or blogs who are giving an honest review or comment on your site. This, however, may be difficult to come across if your website or brand is not well known yet. One way to start building links then is to seek out link exchange opportunities with relevant resources and to submit your website to directories. For the first you may start by posting a link on your site to a resource that you think would be useful to visitors to your site, such as a complementary product or service. If the owner of the website you have linked to is paying attention to his traffic stats, he will see an inbound link coming from your site. Ideally he will choose to reciprocate without you having to request a link back, simply for the sake of providing a better service to his client. A more proactive approach is to introduce yourself and your business to the website owner, praise their website and point out the fact that you are linking to them already, and suggest that perhaps they would want to do the same. People are usually open to these requests as long as they are relevant and done tactfully.
Directories are a good place to start with a linking strategies. Directories, as the name implies, list a lot of websites by topic; some are focused by topic, while others are general and cover a wide breadth of topics. Think of directories as your online Yellow Pages, except there is no one authoritative directory. You should start then by listing your website on a number of relevant directories that have a Page Rank or PR of at least 3. (Install this application on your Firefox browser in order to see a page’s PR on your toolbar.) The way they usually work is that you submit your site for listing and you are notified when your listing has been approved. Most directories use automated processes to approve listings, except for the Open Directory Project, or dmoz which is a human edited directory. Since submissions are approved by people, not machines, the dmoz approval process takes longer than others.
Submitting your website to dmoz should be on your top things to do when starting your linking efforts. You can find other directories by typing ‘directories’ and a topic keyword in your search engine of choice. Keep the points above in mind when selecting which one to submit your website to. While directories with low PR will not hurt your rankings they are also not a very good use of your time.
As a small business, link building is a must-do strategy to increase your traffic that requires no dollar investment but certainly a significant amount of your time.
