Link Building

Why prepare a strategy?

High quality links from relevant trusted and authoritative sites are extremely important in your online marketing strategy.

Link building is a very important part of what you do to establish your market and credibility online. Good links from trusted, relevant sites, point visitors straight to your website. They can now focus in on your products and services as if it was a part of a natural well sign-posted journey to your door.

Link building is very simple when you look at it. In the offline world people in marketing know that the most important way to get new business is via word of mouth. ‘Great business – they deliver to your door, service was excellent, price was great, etc.

What do you get from an incoming link?

An incoming link to your site provides two distinct advantages:

1. Direct Traffic
Traffic is invited/led from the link on the ‘referring site’ to your site. The better the context of the link, the higher the quality and the more trusted the referring site is, the better quality traffic your site will receive.

2. Link Heat
If the search engine ‘sees’ the link as relevant, in context and coming from a trusted site, your site will likely receive a better search engine results page (SERPS) ranking. A Link is a Referral.

We see link building as an online extension of ‘word of mouth’ marketing by increasing the number of people who see your website. They will be driven to your site via quality links from trade bodies, happy clients, etc who link to you because your site is providing quality information and a quick reaction to site visitor requests.

The sites that give you these links are important because their audience buy into them and follow links from their site – it is very powerful marketing although on the surface it looks so basic.

Quality Relevant Links

However, there is also a flaw in this. It’s not a link at any cost. If a garage owner links to a hairdresser that is considered a weak link, whereas if a garage was to link to a tyre supplier such as Goodyear, Google and other search engines will basically give a higher relevance to quality links.

Advice from a Sales Guru (Brian Tracy)

An interesting fact from Brian Tracy’s Secrets of Self Made Millionaires asks the question “How many times do people try to do something that will take them down the road to success before they give up?”. The answer is “less than once”. People give up too easily. They think about it – they think it’s a good idea – they want to be successful, but they won’t even take the first step.

The conclusion is, do your research. Who should be providing links to your site?

• Are you a member of a Trade Body? Do they have online directories?
• Do your suppliers list you as a place to buy their products?
• Are you on their lists? (Chamber of Commerce, BNI, Business Clubs.)

Many of these organisations have websites with members lists and links to your website. They all have value and your site should have links from these and many more.