July 28th, 2009
Link Building – How and Why
If you are looking to gain traction with search engines and wanting also to get people interested in your website topic visiting your site, it is imperative that you get inbound links to your website pages. This seems obvious, yet many website owners are unaware of exactly how important gaining links really is. Moreover, there are an even greater number of website owners who have no understanding of how to do this or why it is important to do it correctly.
Before we can start to think about getting that lovely link juice flowing to your website, you need to stand back for a moment and give your website an honest evaluation about the content you are offering. Is it original? Is it timely and informative? Is it easy to navigate to or does it take ten clicks to reach? Would you send a link to friend to check out the page if it were not your own website? Honest answers to these questions can help you refine existing content or add new content to your site.
There are two basic types of inbound links – natural and not-so-natural. Natural links are the ones that appear when somebody happens across your page and wants to share it with the world because they find the information useful in some way. Not-so-natural links are the ones that are either bought or solicited in some manner. Both are valid, but eventually your goal should be to have so much valuable content that natural links start to spring up around the web. These links will be rewarded by search engines with greater rankings for keywords on your pages.
Why do links matter? Because without them your website will be a very lonely place. Links tell search engines that others value your content. Links are the currency of the online world, the more links you have the more likely you are to have traffic and better serach results. Links bring home the bacon.
So how do you go about getting links? It starts with understanding your own niche. Let’s say you have a business that sells specialty wine. You might consider creating content that discusses the origins of the grapes or the process used to make the wines. You might consider content that contains recipes for meals designed to compliment the wine or a page describing the different glasses used to drink wine from. You might create fan pages on Facebook or scan and create a collection of wine labels which could be of interest to graphic designers. Content can and should be greater than the name of the wine, the cost and a shopping cart – it should engage readers who are interested in specialty wine as a subject matter in order to gain inbound links to the content.
Once you have created a broad array of content about your subject then it becomes time to look for opportunities to ask for links. Many people maintain directories and resources which aim to be complete collections of sites about a particular subject. Start by looking for these resources and asking for links to your core content. Surely there are numerous directories of sites and blogs about wine.
Then begin to look a little further out – what goe sgood with wine? Cheese! So … start looking for opportunities to get links from resources on cheese making to a review on a wine matched perfectly. Use the page you have created about the art of pouring wine as an opportunity to get links from resources on etiquitte.
As you can see, it becomes possible to start building a community of related subjects linking to your content when you start looking beyond the immediate subject and start thinking about relationships your subject has to others.
Another method for gaining links is to become a contributor to other websites via comments, guest posts or reprint article distribution. Look for a roundup of some good resources for this in a future post.
Getting links boils down to creating good content, targeting sites such as directories, blogs and social media sites and asking them to link to your site. Be sure that when you ask, you have a resource worthy of linking to.