Online marketing...
More than just a link
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
It’s pretty much common knowledge that the more links you have coming into your web site the better. People click on links and search engines see them as a vote of confidence in your site.
It’s also widely recognised that links are not all of equal value - some being immensely important and others being worthless. If you are submerged in a "links page", you may as well not bother, no-one is going to click on the link and search engines know the value of a link on such a page.
This article isn’t about these aspects of links but rather the elements that are usually neglected in link building projects.
First of all, a link from another web site should genuinely reflect the fact that the owners of that site feel their visitors would benefit from visiting yours. Anything else is contrived at best.
Your very first task with a link building project is to ensure that there are very good reasons why site owners should want to link to you. In the case of directories it’s as simple as having an up to date site, but with more discerning web sites they will require quite a bit more. Are you an authority on a particular subject? Do you have good quality unique information? Do you offer a useful web based tool?
If you do have a genuinely "linkable" site then people will find you and link to you, but at a pace probably slower than you would like. It’s therefore a good idea to accelerate the process by directly contacting owners of sites that you think would be interested in yours. Not with an impersonal e-mail shot, they have enough of those. Pick up the phone and have a chat, or, if you’re the shy type, send a clearly personalised e-mail mentioning specifically why you think their sites visitors would benefit from taking a look at yours.
This personal approach is really what I wanted to mention here. Time after time we find that once you start talking to other site managers, you discover a whole raft of ways that you can help one another out. We have had site owners/managers do all of the following at no cost (when we say "our site" below we of course mean our client’s site):
Write a full and favourable review of our site
The thing is, asking for a link properly is a great way of breaking the ice with a company that could be a valuable asset to your marketing.
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