How Much Does Your Site Weigh?
It depends on links
Shauna Hill, Web Marketing Consultant

It's well know that search engine optimization is one of the most cost effective ways to market your website. 

It's easy to think All I have to do is optimize it for good search engine rankings, and then wait for the traffic to start pouring in. 

Sometimes that works -- temporarily -- in fact, I've seen sites get 10,000 or more visitors a month with just basic SEO (search engine optimization) marketing. 

However, if that's all the marketing that's ever done, those numbers will start to decline (along with the search engine rankings) and almost always the sales are dismal. But take heart! -- There are a number of things you can do to drive the numbers and sales back up. One important strategy is to get links to your site!

What Counts As a Link?

A link (or hyperlink) is a path, or URL, from some source to some information on your site. This link might be found on another web site or in an email, newsletter or anything (including banner advertisements) that leads people back to your site. Even a listing in search engine is a link, and some engines will rank you higher because of your ranking in other search engines. Reciprocal links are links are an exchange of links between your site and another site. Another key strategy is Affiliate links - links from affiliate partner sites you pay a commission to for each sale generated from their site.

There are many linking strategies, but links are truly one of the cornerstones of conversion marketing (or marketing that converts idle visitors to your site into buyers). Think of it: the purpose of search engines is to index a world wide network of information based on tracing links from one site or page to the next. The more links there are to your site, the more relevance your site has in the indexes. So if links will do all this why is it so few people have links or seek them out? 

The Misconceptions About Links

Do a little poll and you'll find only about a third of sites you visit have a links page and even fewer than that have a active links strategy in their web site marketing plan!

How can it be that something that costs so little (if you do it yourself) and has such high payoffs isn't being grabbed up by the multitudes of web site owners? Frankly, because of misconceptions. There are many action stopping misconceptions about links and here are the four most common:

1) If I give someone a link on my site, I will lose my visitor when they click on it and leave for the other persons site.

2) Links are degrading and cheap. High quality sites don't use them, so I don't want a bunch of links to scream my site is mediocre (this unbeliever will add: I will let someone link to me if they are a recognized big brand and it's free).

3) Links are sometimes interesting but not a web site marketing tool.

4) A link is a link, is a link; so any link will do to get your rankings up.

Debunking the Misconceptions About Links:

First, you don't lose very many visitors to a link and for everyone you might lose, you gain another one from the link they give you back. High quality, well known brand sites DO use links and actively seek them too. Coke has over 6,000 links just in Google alone and they want more -- they certainly want more than Pepsi (actually Pepsi has more total links than Coke ... this week!).

Links are a powerful marketing tool for two main reasons: 1) most search engines factor in site popularity in their ranking algorithms. Because of this, relevant links can improve your search engine rankings; 2) Strategically placed relevant links will capture visitors who are more likely to be buyers on your site. 

The key is to have RELEVANT links. A relevant link is one with a web site that shares one or more keywords or keyword phrases with your site. So to find relevant links for a site about growing roses, exchange links with sites about rose cutting shears, rose food, history of roses, etc. Get links from related content sites, but not your competitors' sites. This will increase the relevancy of the link to your site.

What you do not want is a link to automobile seat covers on a rose growing site. There is no logical connection (or relevancy) and that is the key to strong links. There are slick link farms out there where you can buy into thousands of links but the search engines are wise to the link farms or FFA (free for all) links, so don't use them -- it's a waste of time and money. They will dilute the relevancy of your links.

Building a Link Strategy:

The first step to a strong link strategy is finding out how many links you have now. There are a number of sites providing a free service to check your links in the major search engines, here are three: www.linkpopularitycheck.com  or
www.marketleap.com/publinkpop or www.linkpopularity.com 

The next step is start identifying what subjects would be logical or relevant to link with and then go looking for those sites in the search engines. (It is also a good idea to look at your competitor's links and see if you can get links from the same places).

Once you have found a site that looks like a good linking partner, write them a short note asking for a link. Be sure to give them your URL so they can look at your site before answering. Tell why you think it would be good to exchange links.

KEEP RECORDS of who you wrote, when and whether you got an answer. Good record keeping is an important part of a solid link strategy.

Set a Link Goal:

Decide how many links you want to get in 6 months; divide the number by 24 weeks and then write five times that many letters asking for links per week. 

The basic rule of thumb is -- it takes 30 links to get good recognition from the major search engines -- and you can't have too many (remember how many Coke has).

To see if your link plan is working, watch your web site statistics. Generally speaking, a one-year-old site should be getting as many hits from links as they are from search engines -- and chances are more of your sales will come from visitors you got through a link also.

Just remember that the Internet is a network of information - the more popular your site is in that network, the more successful it will be.

--  Shaun Hill

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