Here you are with a great web design or a website that’s been forgotten and it functions as little more than an online business card. You give someone your business card or send them an email with your website and that’s the only way they will find you. Does this sound like your website? You may be in the market for some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website, if you want this to change. How does free organic traffic to your site sound? If I’m speaking a language you don’t understand, you might want to read one of our other posts, What Is SEO?
While on-site optimization is critical to getting good traffic, we’re concentrating on the next step, which is off-site optimization. This is getting other sites to link to your site, otherwise known as an inbound link or a backlink. If I linked to your site right now talking about how great your business is, that would be an inbound link for you. Why get inbound links? Google uses the number and quality of links to your site as a major measure of whether your site has authority and should show up in the search result listings. Getting more and better quality links to your site is a proven method to getting it ranked better. Google even talks about this in their blog post Good times with inbound links
How do you get more links to your site?
Quality Content or Tools
Creating high quality and relevant content for visitors is one of the best ways to get more links to your site. Alternatively, you can create a highly sought after web tool. Both of these methods creates great organic links to your site from people that are genuinely interested in your content or tools.
Directories
You can list your site in industry and geographically relevant online directories. These directories are used by people searching for your business type and they allow you to have a link back to your site. Be careful on low quality or spammy looking directories. You can waste a lot of time for no benefit by focusing on low quality directories.
Link Building
You can hire someone to help build links for your company. There are a lot of questions you will want to ask this company as there are a lot of questionable methods used out there. You want to make sure that you get high quality links and that it’s done in a method that Google approves of so you can avoid getting penalized by Google.
What should you watch out for with building links?
Quality, Quality, Quality. Low quality links will either not help your site or could possibly get you penalized or banned from Google. Either way, you’re losing money. High quality link builders are hard to come by. 99% of the self-professed link building experts will spam your URL information to forums and low quality directories with little to no results. Don’t waste your time on this.
Jared Pomranky
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