Are you aware that right now there are potentially millions of people searching online for what your business offers, but are they finding your website.
Over the years there has been so much promotional hype placed on getting links, however much of that information is out dated or dead wrong and can land your business into a situation that it may never recover from.
The Wrong Link Strategy Can Have A Negative Impact On Your Business
One reason this swarm of traffic maybe passing you by is the quality of back links you have acquired, this can have a huge effect on how and where your website is indexed.
The three main search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing look for back links to your website and then give each one of those links a value.
Depending on the quality of the back link this can have a positive or negative effect on your search engine rankings especially when it comes to Google.
External links are no longer as effective as they once were, the more you had with your primary keyword in the anchor text the better the ranking in the search engines. After many updates especially in Google there is actually a value now placed on each external link pointing to your site and then ranked each page is accordingly to the quality of the that link.
Note: Google ranks pages not websites, the higher the quality of content the better the incoming links and social engagement resulting in better long-term rankings.
In some cases a link can have a negative value placed on it due to low quality or being on an unrelated page (spam), which in turn can drag down site rankings.
What this means to small business is simple, get good quality links and you will have better rankings, it really is that easy. Use UN-qualified outsourcing companies that build links on low quality or spam auto generated sites and you will see your site rankings decline fast, maybe not today or even tomorrow but it will happen.
Google is taking no prisoners and they really don’t care who or what you are selling, if you are doing the wrong thing you will be discovered it’s only a matter of time.
You Need A More Natural Link Building & Social Profile
Since the release of Panda and the follow on of Penguin many of the link building strategies no longer work, in fact some of them can get your site penalised very fast. The reason was simple, people were to focused on trying to rank for only a small range of keywords that really offered no link diversity and looked very UN-natural to Google. This was all done, according to Google to manipulate search listings.
You may be thinking, after all the updates that links are bad for your business, but you would be wrong. Quality back links are more important than ever before when it comes to achieving higher rankings and getting more sales and or leads.
How Can You Create Natural Inbound Links
The most effective way to do this is by giving Google exactly what it wants, Quality, Useful Content. Building sites with no planning or content strategy in place is a recipe for disaster and an expensive one, you need to be planning and thinking through every aspect of your business and what goals you want it to achieve. Doing this will also assist you to build and get links in a much more natural way, including social and user engagement.
Content management is the key to getting the results you need to see success, by utilising your expertise in your business you should be able to write high quality and helpful information for your site visitors, this is the starting process so you can build authority for your site and trust with a prospective client and a way to funnel them to the areas of your website that are relevant.
Next you need to be writing supporting articles that are all related to the initial Pillar content you first created and then linking those articles to a product or service page and also back to the initial content page. The supporting articles are a great way to improve a sites bounce rate which may or may not be an indicator for better rankings.
What this does for link building is firstly gives you a hub of closely related content on your website, next the quality of the content attracts other website owners to link to your content and lastly site visitors will engage with that content across different social media platforms.
The next part of the process is to ensure that you have a Facebook Page, Twitter Account and Google Plus account. If you have the ability to create videos then it is also advisable to have a YouTube page as well. All these networks allow links back to your site and are natural ways to get links without risking your business. Of course everything needs to be done in moderation and using diversity to get the best flow of authority to the homepage and internal pages.
In conclusion: this is only a small part of the big picture when marketing a website online, get it right and you will see more traffic for less effort. Continue doing it the wrong way and you will be throwing money away faster than you can make it. Providing good information coupled with social media is the faster and most effective way to build trust, increase your brand and display a credible profile to everyone one.
Have you been involved with any link building for your business?
Do you believe as I do that the best way forward for any small online business is to build sites that offer helpful information not just page after page of products that have little to no real value to the site visitor.
Hello Ron,
I agree with your post that wrong link building can be proven harmful to your website as well as gives negative impacts to your website so better is avoid it and do organic link building to get a reliable website.