If you know very much about Search Engine Optimisation you will certainly be aware that the two most important activities you can do to achieve good rankings for your website (and hence increase your traffic and sales) are:
- Create Good Quality, Unique Content
- Link Building
This post focuses on Link Building Techniques and provides an overview of some of the different strategies that a small business website owner should consider when looking at increasing the quantity and quality of links to their website from third party sites.
5 Approaches to Link Building
There are hundreds of different ways a small business can go about building links for their site. I have outlined below 5 broad approaches to link building. Not all strategies are necessarily appropriate for all websites or businesses, so I suggest that you review each of the broad strategies listed below – pick one that "feels right" in relation to your business, and then spend some time brainstorming specific strategies you can use to build links.
Competitors
Take a look at your competitors websites – and more importantly – where they get links from. You can find out who links to your competitors with a Yahoo Site Explorer search such as this: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:yourcompetitor.com.au -site:yourcompetitor.com.au
(where yourcompetitor.com.au is, use your competitors actual domain name of course). This will produce a list of external sites that link to www.yourcompetitor.com.au . You can then see which of these sites may be suitable (and willing) to link to your own website.
Keywords
You already know what keywords are the best ones for you to rank for right? And if not you should undertake a Keyword Analysis. Do a search for your primary keywords, and find out which external sites link to the ones that appear in the top positions (using the same technique described above).
Niche
In your business, there are bound to be categories or subcategories of the products or services you offer that you can more easily dominate it the search engines. For example, trying to compete for "widgets" might be very difficult, however "waterproof widgets" is likely to be much less competitive. Choose a niche – and then determine which type of customers are likely to to be most interested in that particular niche – then search for websites that cater specifically for those types of people for other products/services and consider approaching those sites for links. For example, people interested in boating, or swimming may also be interested in your waterproof widgets.
Locality
More and more people are including locality information in their search queries. Local Search Optimisation is a huge topic in it's own right, but if your product or service is relevant for a specific locality or community, or if your customers come primarily from a certain region, look for linking opportunities from other sites that rank well for queries associated with that specific area.
Expert
If you really understand the products and services that you provide, maybe you should be telling other people (i.e. potential customers) about it. Write articles or other content and publish them on your own site or blog, become active in forums and communities where your customers are also likely to hang out, submit comments or become a "guest poster" for a related blog, look for any opportunities to tell the world what you know – and make sure that you include links back to your site in the process.
By focusing on one of the five approaches to link building outlined above, and doing a bit of brainstorming, you should be able to come up with many opportunities to develop links. Ultimately the specific strategy that you use does not really matter – what does matter is that you start doing it now – the sooner you can get started, the sooner you will start to see positive results in your rankings. traffic and sales.
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