Increasing link popularity is important in search engine optimization and effective linking can give a real boost to rankings.
But, there are other important benefits to link popularity that rarely get mentioned.
As a result, they are not incorporated into planning link campaigns: but they should be and this article will explore why.
Some benefits may seem obvious, others not. But put them together and you’ll be able to create a comprehensive linking strategy focused on delivering business results.
You’ll be able to make a compelling business case for all the hard work and effort that has to go into a successful link campaign and you’ll have a much higher likelihood of success.
Let’s list the benefits, and then look at them in more detail.
An effective linking strategy can:
1. Create a detailed map of your industry online
2. Create trust in your brand
3. Attract qualified leads
4. Create value for your customers
5. Attract even more links
6. Establish your company in a virtual community.
1. Create a detailed map of your industry online
Understanding the business environment in which you work is fundamental to success, yet how many of us have a true picture of our industry online?
Rather than conducting research to ‘find potential link targets’, conduct research in order to understand the online marketplace and your place within it.
That knowledge in itself can bring substantial benefit to your business.
So, if you sell environmental services, you need to know where to find out about existing and proposed legislation, you need to know the latest research, the hot topics and the debates that may be raging.
If you sell luxury chocolates, you need to know the sites were quality gifts are reviewed and recommended and you need to know the sites that chocoholics visit.
Understanding the marketplace means gathering information and resources, sifting through them and drawing sound conclusions.
Within your industry online, you need to identify:
Spend a few weeks trawling these sites, reading the newsletters, watching or taking part in discussions. You’ll quickly get a picture of the important sites, the type of content they carry, how often they are updated, which are first for breaking news.
Next step: Classify the sites you have identified.
Some will be great sources of industry knowledge, some may be great for recruitment, others great for customers to gather and find out about products. Draw up a full list together with brief comments about each one. This will be a very important document to share with your staff or web developers – they will find it useful for all sorts of reasons.
Look at your own position within the online marketplace. How often are you mentioned? How often are your competitors mentioned? What could you do to improve your visibility?
What business objectives could you achieve if you were more active?
2. Create trust in your brand
Creating trust in the brand can be a major problem for sites that have just been launched and for small to medium sized companies who have little budget for brand building.
But you are often known by the company you keep and a well-linked site builds trust.
If respected industry portals or newsletters carry a link to your site, they pass on a degree of status. If you are mentioned in all the right places, prospects will come across your name again and again – repeated exposure builds awareness and strengthens your brand.
3. Attract qualified leads
Following links is one of the most popular ways for people to find new sites. According to research from http://www.gatech.edu Georgia Tech, 85% of people find new sites through following a link – this compares to 87% for search engines and 38% for email. So linking can be one of the best ways to attract new business. According to the Seybold Group, 50% of Amazon’s new customers arrive through links from other sites.
Every link from an external site is another opportunity for a qualified lead to find and arrive at your site. The more links you have, the more qualified traffic you could attract.
Look at the sites you identified and classified in your research.
Which sites offer the best potential for capturing prospects and what will you have to do to persuade them to link to you. ? What competitive selling messages are people likely to meet? How can you strengthen the impact of your own message?
The key to this is to be aware of the value that you offer and to present that value through your link text in a way that attracts customers. Not an easy task, but not impossible either.
What content do you have on your site? How attractive is that content to potential link targets? How attractive is the content to users of their sites?
If you run an environmental consultancy, a self-assessment tool or a white paper will be attractive. If you sell chocolates, an article on seasonal gifts or daily recipes could be attractive. ‘Content’ could be an online sales facility, an online service, a self-assessment tool, an instant quotation, a white paper, tips on using your products, a problem solving article – even a comprehensive set of links for your industry.
If you feel your site lacks content, you’ll have to create it. Without good content other worthwhile sites will simply not link to you.
Look to the information and expertise within your company. How much of that could be turned into valuable content? Rework the material for the web or employ a professional writer to do the work for you. (Excellent free guide from http://www.tightcopy.com Kathy Henning)
Look at your most attractive content. Make sure it is easily accessible from your home page. Look at the titles and descriptions. Do they really do a selling job for you? Sites that link to you are likely to use your own titles and descriptions. If these are not benefit rich and customer focused, you’re wasting a major opportunity.
Which of these is the most attractive?
APEX Environmental Consultancy – Company Profile
Welcome to the website of APEX Environmental Consultancy. This site provides a guide to the wealth of experience we have accumulated over 25 years …
APEX – Europe’s Leading Environmental Consultancy
Covering risk management, environmental monitoring, planning and design with offices in London, Paris and Dsseldorf.
The second might just get the vote.
4. Provide value for your customers
You can provide value by sharing, guiding and directing your customers to useful resources.
You can’t just have inbound links, you must also direct people to valuable external resources. This should not be confused with reciprocal linking – ‘if you link to me, I’ll link to you’ – which is worthless. Link to external resources because they are useful, not because they happen to link back to you.
Many sites refuse to provide external links because they feel they will lose customers. But you are much more likely to lose customers if you stand on the sidelines and miss the opportunity to help them. Customers will already be searching online – much better that they should get information through you than having to search themselves.
You need to be confident enough in your own offering.
You can direct your prospects and customers to content that they’ll find of value and which will help them in their buying decisions.
So the environmental consultant may want to link to state regulations, industry debates, published research and reports: the chocolate retailer may choose to link to entertaining articles, reviews of her own products or shopping guides.
The material you collected in your research of your industry is valuable material. How much of that could you productively share with your prospects or customers?
5. Attract even more links
If your site is well-linked, then the probability of attracting further links increases.
This happens for a number of reasons – you’ll feature high in search engines rankings so more people will find you, more webmasters will be exposed to your material and your PageRank on Google will be relatively high, making you more attractive to link to.
There is a simple power law at work – the ‘rich get richer’ or ‘links attract links’.
Of course, the ideal situation is where your content or services are considered so good that people link to you without even being asked.
Put an effective linking strategy in place and over time it will gain its own momentum and each new link created will become a source of new prospects for your business.
Such a power law has implications for your competitive standing. If a competitor has more relevant links than you, then the gap between you is sure to grow – unless you take some affirmative action.
6. Establish your company in a virtual community.
Every industry has a virtual community online. Some may be under-developed, others busy hubs with hundreds or thousands of visitors every day and lots of business being done. An effective linking strategy helps you become part of that virtual community.
If you are an active member of that community, you’ll have all the benefits that I’ve talked about.
You will:
A linking strategy is difficult and it demands a lot of work and a lot of persistence to be successful.
Yet, ultimately linking is what the web is all about. You will come up against obstacles and frustrations but in the process you will learn a huge amount.
Companies who recognize the importance of linking and incorporate it into their thinking will be the ones to prosper and survive.
Ken McGaffin provides link building services to established and new
launch websites. He is the author of the highly acclaimed ‘Linking
Matters Report’. You can claim your free copy at
http://www.linkingmatters.com.
