In case of majority of the business sites, links from other leading websites and online resources – blogs, industry news sites, portals, customer review forums etc – are missing from the SEO action plan. It is worth remembering that hyperlinks not only enhance the traffic flow, but also ensure improved webpage rank. It enables sustained flow of customers and a steady revenue stream.
A well executed link building exercise leads to recognition and reputation of your website by gradually increasing its credibility and trust factor. Nevertheless, the task of backlinks’ generation demands planning and patience! The fact is that sudden surge in traffic might be achieved in a matter of days by artificial boosting of search ranks, but such tactics are bound to backfire over a period of time.
Achieving consistent and focused traffic is preferable from conversion point of view. Your goal can be attained with a time tested and fine tuned strategy instead of haphazard and hurriedly chalked out link building plan. Keeping this in mind, here are some handy ideas for small businesses to conduct the exercise in a professional manner.
- One way of getting a backlink to your business site is to populate it with original and meaningful content pages, which are updated on a regular basis – consisting of an anchor text or some other link to your website – and to offer that content to a popular portal, review forum or a content syndication service. Volunteer to pen a guest post on your industry specific blog. Add in it, a backlink to your website or product catalog page.
- Research about your site visitor’s preferences and check the pages on it that they visit the most, in order to gather more about their usage pattern. This will allow you to write the kind of content they are looking for and link up some of the most popular pages to draw their attention.
- It is a good idea to make use of reliable keyword tools like Google Insights for Search and AdWords Keyword Tool to gauge search volume for relevant terms and identify widely searched phrases so that you can insert them in your titles, headers, introduction and copy text in a discreet manner.
- Here’s a word of caution: Reciprocal links wherein two sites continue to link back as part of a mutual arrangement is something that should be used with discretion. Such informal exchanges won’t necessarily be viewed as quality links by the search engines.
- In our next post of the series, we shall discuss dos and don’ts of enhancing your site’s online visibility and credibility through link building.