Street Smart Guide To Small Business Marketing
Getting Links to Your Website
Getting Links to Your Website - It's a Must:
 Let's
just say you've got quality content posted on your site, and a product
or service to offer. How do you get the customers to start coming
without spending money? Links. People will use links to navigate to
your webpage, and the more websites link to yours, the more attention
it will get from search engines.
It's important to
understand that all links are not created equal, at least not in the
eyes of major search engines like Google.com. "High quality" links will
generate much more benefit for a small business than a bunch of links
from random list sites.
High Quality Link Characteristics:
- Relevant keywords, text, or descriptions surrounding the link.
- Links from sites of a similar nature.
- Links from popular or top-rated sites.
- Links to a specific, targeted page within your website.
Link Internally:
Does every page on your website link to other,
relevant pages? Making your own pages dynamic first is a great way to
increase the number of links going into each page, with relevant
keywords.
Link Externally:
Knowing the types of websites that go along with
yours is important when approaching other sites and requesting a link.
You're more likely to get results by requesting links from those who
are not direct competitors. You can get more visitors and a higher
quality pool of visitors by targeting specific, related websites and
creating links back to your site.
The more websites
link back to your site, the higher your site is going to rank on search
engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This is a key part of called
search engine optimization (SEO).
There are many ways to get other websites to link back to your site. Here are a few:
Reciprocal Linking:
This is where you
exchange links with other sites. For example, you might send an email
to the webmaster of a similar site simply asking if they'll post a link
to your site. Typically, you'll post one also to their site on your
links page in exchange.
The nice
thing about reciprocal linking is that you can use it to your
advantage, even if you've not yet created an affiliate program or free
course (which is always recommended, too). Many other
businesses/websites will respond to your request for a reciprocal link
because they are getting something equally beneficial. You can use
Alexa.com to rank the best reciprocal link partners. Someone with
hundreds of backlinks is more useful to you than someone with only a
few.
Creating a "Links"
page on your own website (since you're agreeing to host a reciprocal
link back to their site) is easy to do. If you're not sure how, hire a
web professional or just use Google to get instructions for creating a
"Links" page on your own site. It is most beneficial to have your
"Links" page created before you start emailing others for a reciprocal
link.
Posting Comments on Other Sites, Blogs, and Forums:
 If
you've got a website selling nutrition supplements, for example, you
might seek out a list of health or dietary forums, blogs or websites
that have the same keywords and articles similar to your site's
content.
Post comments on
these websites yourself with links back to your own small business
website. Remember, avoid making them sound like sales pitches; try to
craft comments to sound more like a satisfied customer, expert, or
researcher with important expertise to offer the forum community.
Post All of Your Articles on Your own Website:
Every time you write a
new article, publish a version of it on your own website or blog.
With a content-rich website, you're bound to get hundreds of
followers, especially if you tell them they can reprint parts of
versions your articles and put them on their own site (with a backlink
and credit to you, of course).
The more followers you've got, and the more people linking to your
site, the more viral your entire site becomes (For those of you who
aren't up on Internet jargon, "going viral" is a good
thing.) and the higher your site ranks on the top search engines. This
is a key marketing strategy for small businesses competing with larger
corporations.
What's Next
Next In This Guide
Part 36:
 E-mail Marketing and Newsletters - Take advantage of the cheapest and easiest marketing tools a small business has: e-mail marketing and newsletters.
Previous In This guide
Part 34:
 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Learn the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for marketing your small business website.
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 Street Smart Guide to Small Business Marketing
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