SEO Meets Marketing: Link Building, Is It For You?
With many businesses engaging in advertising wars in order to win over the majority of the Internet’s viable market, it’s easy to deduce the intensity of the competition. After all, the Internet and its network of information grow exponentially by the minute, while the increase in the number of users more or less takes a little slower.
In the hopes of gaining a steady traffic flow to your company Web site, some businesses utilise paid advertising on high exposure commercial portals of the Internet. If traffic volume is already established on these large portals with a proven advertising model, this can be a great way to launch your Web site and start getting traffic immediately. Pay per click (PPC) is another great way of getting instant traffic to your website because this requires no start-up costs at all. The big advantage of this model is that you only pay for the traffic that is generated from the advertisers Web site directly to your Web site.
In general terms, these two advertising methods are good solutions when you need quick traffic boosts in the shortest possible time frame. For a minimal amount of hours invested you can dramatically reduce the learning curve needed for the more traditional search engine optimisation. But as with everything in life there are advantages and disadvantages and search engine optimisation is definitely no exception.
If you were to begin cataloguing the sheer volume of existing online information you would become completely overwhelmed and extremely confused and very quickly. Services such as Google work hard at helping you sort through the clutter and confusion by delivering to you the most relevant search results based on your particular keyword searches. The tools offered by the search companies are becoming more and more intuitive each day, but ultimately these services must also work on their own business model to continue offering the service they do. Which brings us to our next point…
Google states that you must play by their rules if you want to use their services. They are expending a lot of energy ensuring that advertisers create ads with a high degree of relevancy to their advertised Web site. It therefore stands to reason that advertisers who stray from this requirement will be penalised to the extent of removing the advertisers listing from the returned list of search query results. This is to ensure a higher quality of advertised listings and guarantee more useful information will be returned to the search engine user. More relevant search returns; more perceived value in that particular search engine.
Another technique by which to hike up rankings is by providing quality information that is both highly relevant and targeted towards a particular set of keywords pre-determined by the website. With careful market study and a study of consumer behavior, businesses can study just what keywords yield traffic, and subsequently shape their business website in order to best address the demand.
However, one of the more effective ways to increase traffic to your website is through the process of link building. Link building is a process through which you try to obtain links from other websites that lead back to your website. Through approaching websites of similar interest to yours, both businesses can enjoy the mutual benefits and assist in giving users a better browsing experience.
It is the view of many search engine marketers, myself included, that developing a successful link building campaign is the single best job that a website owner should undertake. As your understanding of this technique increases, so too will your ability to source out and choose the best potential link partners to approach. The returns for a successful link building can be many, but the two biggest advantages are direct page visits through your partner sites back links, and the search engine ranking boost that is allocated by competing search engines. The higher your website is ranked in the search engines, the more traffic you will get.
If the primary reason for attaining back links to your website is to prove to the search engines that you are an authority site, then it stands to reason that you must also create the impression of expertise and knowledge with everything that you do. With this impression comes an increase in perceived value and trust. This trust and increased authority will as a result attract more web sites wishing to be affiliated with you. And so the cycle continues…
Another way to do this is by soliciting the help of affiliate web pages. Businesses try to make affiliates by constantly reviewing products, articles, and services offered by other companies on their websites that could serve to complement the service or products to their own. This gives the other company greater impetus to provide links to the business because after all, it features their product. This also results in mutual referral, especially in the case of two complementary products.
Prior to canvassing a potential Web site to become your link partner, you should always be considering the suitability of the sites purpose. It would be counterintuitive to approach Webmasters who practice unethical seo techniques, who in the long run would do more harm for your site than good. It is also worth noting that prior to contacting a potential link partner, you should have some clearly defined benefits for why your prospect would want to link back to your site. As with any business transaction, people are more inclined to transact with you if they can see a direct benefit for them.
Make your site relevant and reputable for the best possible link building opportunities. Through effective link building, your business will cut through the clutter like a beacon in the night. Research your market, seek out possible link associations, offer that site owner a benefit for that Association and watch your site rise. I wish you all the best in business as in life.
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