How to Build
Quality Links to Your Small Business Website
Not all links are created equal in the eyes of the search engines.
However, link building to your website as a strategy for small
business Internet marketing, whatever the quality of the links,
will be viewed positively to some degree. The best kind of inbound
link is one that is one-way only, and that comes from a quality
site that the search engines consider important.
Unfortunately when you are just launching your site, you will
find it very difficult to persuade the owners of quality websites
to provide a one-way inbound link to your site. The very first
thing that you should do, therefore, is make sure that your website
is one that quality sites would want to link to.
Provide high quality, regularly updated content throughout your
site, and never cut corners. No one will link to a poor quality
site, so make yours the best you possibly can. This takes time,
but it is time well spent, for the effects will last well into
the future.
One method of getting one-way inbound links to your site is to
locate quality sites that you would like to have links from. If
they provide a service or sell a product, become a customer. Then
submit a glowing testimonial to the site owner. Make your testimonial
benefit laden, explaining how it helped you. Write it in such
a way that potential customers might be swayed to buy.
Most website owners are delighted to receive unsolicited testimonials
and will usually publish them on their site as an additional tool
to persuade people to buy their product. They will usually also
be willing to provide a back link to your website as a way of
saying 'thanks.' This link-building strategy is easy to implement
and very underused. It can be surprisingly effective too, though
it does take time to build up.
Another common method of getting one-way inbound links is to submit
your website to a number of directories. There are hundreds of
directories, most of them are free to submit to, but some ask
for a payment. Often the payment required is small though.
Submitting your site to directories is easy to do. A search on
any of the major search engines for "directory submission list,"
or something similar, should yield a large number of sites that
you can submit your site to. Manual submission is fairly easy,
but time consuming. However, there are a number of software programs
that make this part easier, though some manual intervention is
usually still necessary.
Social media sites are becoming increasingly popular. They can
have considerable link building value to the website owner too,
if used properly. Most of the social media sites, such as MySpace,
Squidoo, Del.icio.us and others, will allow you to create a profile,
or even a specialized blog.
If you provide real value on these sites and add your site link,
using appropriate anchor text if possible, you will create a very
valuable one-way inbound link for your site. Some of these sites
use the "nofollow" tag, which tells the search engines not to
follow the link, thereby not giving you credit for it. However,
it is still worth doing as a small business Internet marketing
strategy, as you can get valuable traffic as a result, and sometimes
the search engines ignore the "nofollow" tag anyway.
There are a large number of sites that allow you to create a free
blog. Using these places you can create a number of blogs and
post to them regularly with links back to your main website. Admittedly,
this will be you linking to your own site, but the search engines
won't know this. And besides, using this strategy you have complete
control over the anchor text you use to link.
Adopting an effective linking strategy for your website need not
be particularly difficult, or expensive. Persistence and a degree
of continuity is the key. Link building should not be viewed as
a one-time small business Internet marketing event. It is an ongoing
activity that should last the lifetime of the website. The work
put in will definitely pay off handsomely in the long term.
About Melberg Marketing
Melberg Marketing specializes in powerful copywriting, compelling
graphic design and professional marketing consulting that gets
you noticed - both online and off. If you'd
like to start marketing DIFFERENTLY, give us a call!
Ask us how we can help
you market YOUR business on the Internet... Today!
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Caroline Melberg • Melberg Marketing • caroline@melberg.com
• 952-473-1007 • www.melberg.com
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