Link Building – How it Can Help Your Business
A company’s website can be one of its most powerful marketing and sales tools, providing resources to support customers at every stage of the buying process. But a site is of no use to anyone unless customers can reliably find it.
When Google took the search engine world by storm, link analysis was key to their formula. Links provided an organic way for search engines to judge the quality of a website: After all, when someone links to a website, it’s likely they find it valuable. Over the years, search algorithms have developed advanced ways to weight the usefulness of links based on the popularity and trustworthiness of the linking site, and even to judge the relevance of a site’s subject matter based on what kind of sites are linking to it.
Search engines use a variety of techniques to determine the relevance and popularity of a given web page, but most will give weight to the number of links that point to it. This makes link building, an approach geared toward encouraging inbound links to a website, one of the most effective ways to raise the site’s profile.
A basic link building strategy involves asking users of a website, customers and associated businesses, to share links back to the site. This not only encourages traffic from direct referrals, but gives the site more exposure across the online landscape.
An important lesson for successful link building, then, is that not all links are guaranteed to help. In the early 2000s, a popular SEO trick involved having a network of websites host links to one another, or to clients’ sites, merely to improve their search results. That prompted search engines to develop tools for detecting “web spam,” sites that try to influence search rankings without providing good content. A valuable link, by contrast, comes from a quality, trusted website that search engines have no reason to ignore.
It is also possible for search engines to judge the subject matter of a site, and therefore its relevance to a given search topic, based on the links pointing to it. Links that are associated with keywords referencing the company’s business, or coming from peers in a similar field, are therefore especially helpful.
When it comes to the mechanics of linking, businesses have more tools than ever. Reciprocal linking, when two sites exchange links to each other, can still be valuable if both sites are engaged in similar or related business, and both have good reputations. It’s also possible to provide visitors with a simple script they can copy and paste onto their websites, possibly even a company logo or advertisement banner. And lately, social networking integration can allow visitors to share links to a company’s page on Facebook, Twitter or a variety of other social sites with a single click. The easier these tools are to access, the more links a site is likely to receive.
Naturally, the most reliable way to attract links, and to make sure search engines will honor them, is to create a site with content that visitors are willing to share. Link building is valuable because it satisfies two goals at once: Producing website that users find rewarding enough to help promote, and raising the profile of a business in a way that helps attract the waves of new traffic that a high search ranking can bring in.