James Cope

I often talk to businesses about how they spend lots of time and money optimising their website but they still struggle to get good search engine rankings. After we have looked at their onsite optimisation elements I usually ask the question ‘what’s your inbound link strategy?’

Usually businesses are plagued with calls from perhaps less reputable companies offering to get them onto page one by building links for £200-£400 pcm without any thought for relevancy. Some website owners have built their own thought through plan, however more often than not it is an area that is overlooked and unclear as to the approach to take.

I would suggest that the value of inbound links are crucial in the optimisation effort to ensure your site is well ranked. There are many arguments to support my belief an example of one of these is

‘There are two reasons to build links to your site.
1. Direct Traffic: Links send direct traffic to your website that could convert into leads and clients.
2. Search Engine Optimization: Links are the key to getting you ranked on the first page of the major search engines for your target keywords. This search traffic is very likely to convert into leads and clients. ‘

If you are still not convinced there is more from the source of the quote at the following article Why You Need to Build Links and What A Good One Looks Like

The subject of this post is not really to convert you to the idea of the need for inbound links but to give an idea of how this can be done.  There are some basic steps that site owners can take but before you do I would encourage you to ensure you have your statistics in place so that you can measure the your success.

Step 1. Business directories & Social media – simple entries in directories are good to get, some may cost others are free. Your site statistics will begin to show which are referring traffic to you so you can decide which of those paid links are worthwhile. Social media sites may or may not provide much in terms of link score benefit but may well send visitors to you.

Step 2. Press releases and articles – there are lots of online sites you can post your press releases and place articles, pressbox.comis an example of these, remember to include a link to your site in the article. This step involves more work and of course there is no guarantee that the press releases will get picked up. If you have a blog and are writing content for that then this step should not take too much extra work. The good news if that there are experts out there you could consider contracting to deliver regular content for you. Your local Business Link can provide details of local businesses providing the service.

Step 3. Link with other websites – my tip here is not to beg, think how you would network at business event, or business meeting, can your site add value to their site visitors, and build links through a natural synergy. Of course this approach won’t work for everyone and sometimes a more aggressive strategy is needed. A tracking spreadsheet might be worthwhile keeping as you would use a contact manager, so you know who you need to follow up.

Obviously its not as simple as that, there is hard work, time and effort to put in along the way.  Looking at other businesses blogs, responding to their articles to build your relationship, or networking in your local area will be the challenge here.

Another technique that some businesses adopt is the creation of multiple sites with specific content to each and use of a blog that promotes them. David Lakins @ KeyMultimedia who specialise in website promotion work, use this technique well on behalf of their client. The sites form a three way link, each building important page rank with unique content, promoting and supporting the other. Check out the following sites to see the example at work, the first site is the wet suit centre second site is the sorted surf shop and the surf related blog that serves both is interestingly named manky monkey .

If you want to try getting started there is another blog article that takes a similar view and gives more tips here on link building there is another article from the same blog which covers how not to do it which makes for a really good read how not to link build

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Back in June I covered the importance of capturing location based traffic searches for businesses that operate geopgraphically. Local search is still important but with the appearance of Bing and predicted increase in search market share, I would suggest including this in your strategy.

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