March 5th, 2007 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

It is widely accepted that achieving good search results is a 2 step process (3 if you include the on-going maintenance). The first part is to optimise the pages that make up your website. This includes making sure that all the right tags are in the right place, having carefully written copy, a search friendly HTML layout and a site linking structure that ensures that all your pages can be found by the search robots and indexed. The second and far more difficult part is link building.

In order to be trusted by the search engines your website needs other websites to link to it, only by doing this will you weave your website into the fabric of the world wide web. It is this weaving that builds trust, provides other sources of visitors and eventually helps to improve your search ranking. Without links your website is an island, people may stumble across you by accident but what you want is good communication channels (links) with all the other related islands. Ideally you want relevant one way links to your website, the problem is how to achieve this?

With information based websites it can be relatively simple to get these links, publish information on a subject you know a lot about and other people interested in what you have to say will start to link to you. Controversy, an opinion, useful information. In the new world of social bookmarking and blogging this is even easier. Information is what the web is all about and as long as you can write original informative content then you should be ok. Unfortunately for the small buiness owner this natural link building is a lot harder to achieve, after all who is going to write a comment about and link to “Jim’s Tackle Shop’s” listing of a fishing rod?

As the owner of a small business website there are several tactics you can adopt to improve your link popularity. The first is to take advantage of the many business directories on the internet. But aren’t they shunned by Google, Yahoo etc? It’s true that a lot of the directories are worthless in terms of link value to your website, however some directories are very much search engine friendly, have high page rank (so are valued by Google) and can be of real benefit to your business website. A lot of these require paid submission, others don’t but this form of link building can be a cost effective way of gaining one way links. Another way of gaining links is link exchange, swapping links with other related businesses. The main problem here is that recipricol linking is now penalised by the major search engines making the links you gain nothing like as valuable as what they once were. However, your linking strategy shouldn’t be all about the search engines and this method of linking can be a valuable way of gaining new visitors. It is important to stress that these links should be from respected, related websites.

When it comes to building natural links for your business it’s going to take a little extra work. There are 2 methods that I favour. The first is to create a blog or news page on which you can comment on the latest news in your business sector. This should be totally original content. This is a page that contains your views and opinions, it is this type of content that is much more likely to attract links from visitors. You can also submit your new blog to the many blog directories helping to create more one way links and also attracting new visitors to your website. By combining this type of content with a clever site structure you can pass this new found link popularity around your site! The other advantage of a news page/blog is that it is very easy to add an RSS feed. RSS (Really simple syndication) is a way of keeping people up to date with anything new on your website and in terms of link building for the small business it can be a life saver. You can submit these RSS feeds to the many RSS listing directories, but more importantly if your content is interesting other websites will use your RSS feeds to create content on their websites normally resulting in a large number of one way links. This can be especially effective for product listings where you can find your products being listed on other websites all linking back to you.

The second method I use for building link popularity on business websites is article writing. There are a large number of services available that list articles and that will even distribute your articles for you. By writing a simple article on a subject you have knowledge off, ensuring you contain a link back to your website, you can submit it and almost instantly reach a large number of potential customers as well as providing more links back to your site. It is also worth noting that a lot of Blogs concentrate on commenting on articles and this can be a valuable source of natural linking.

As I said building link popularity for a small business website isn’t that easy, it requires time, effort and money but in order to achieve good search results it’s vital. For some it may appear strange that you have to deviate from a totally business focussed approach to your website and start giving out information and opinions for free, but it is this sort of content that attracts people to link to you.

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Paul B