Another quick post on a few articles on link building that I thought deserved your attention:
Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts put together by Pole Position Marketing. You can even download a pdf file.
No Recession For Link Building by Eric Ward
How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer, by Eric Ward
I read a great article today over at Convert Offline, It’s No Secret… Link Building In Local Search Is Different. Tim talks about link building for the local business.
I have talked about this subject a while back at Building small business websites for today. In that post I link to a couple of articles I wrote on the subject.
“In the same way that the best links for traditional websites are those that help with traffic, the best links for a local service business are those that provide help with conversions.” I could not agree more.
Make sure you read the comments too. Earlpearl said, “My experience is that it is tough to get local links….and requires lots of consistent effort..” Yes link building is not always easy and will take some time but it will be worth your time.
A few places to look for potential local links are Merchant Circle, ShowMeLocal, MojoPages, Localguides, etc-directories where you can search by location.
Link building is one of those things that needs to be on every webmaster’s to do list. It is a critical component to any online promotion campaign. The search engines love them and your visitors do too. Most non technical business owners agree with me when I explain linking and its benefits to their website/business. The problem always comes down to, where do we get links? how much is going to cost?
One of benefits of local search marketing is that is a natural link building tool. A lot of what you can do for local search will create links to your website, thus providing more avenues for local searchers to find your business.
Debra Mastaler, wrote a nice article the other day, Customer Surveys: A Powerful Link Building Tool, which I wanted to point out. The article is not written specifically to local searches but I thought her points were good. It might get a bit technical but the overall message should makes sense.
Debra uses surveys to find places to get links for customers and uses them also to attact links to the business site.
“Surveys are versatile little things. Don’t just think of them as information collectors: they can also be used to make content viral….. Offering valuable giveaways and incentives in exchange for taking a survey increases the chance the survey will be passed and linked to.”
“Survey results are highly desirable to the blogging and business community since they provide verifiable evidence and substantial content”
As I tell clients, set up a survey and/or a customer feedback form. These are great tools to interact with customers, provide insight to customer concerns, trends, etc, and can create traffic and links.
The last component I want to talk about is linking. Link building is a critical component to any website promotional campaign.
Years ago when I started online, linking was just beginning to get going. Now linking is a big business but there is also a lot more abuse in linking. It is harder to get links today because it seems everyone is looking for links. I have seen a lot of companies out there saying they will find “quality” links but…
Linking takes a lot of time and effort. As with every promotion you can either do it yourself or hire someone to do it.
A new resource that I have recently reviewed is “A Plan for Free Web Traffic” by Paul Easton. Paul put together a nice ebook for beginners. Paul has been online for 5 years and has used his experience to put together a nice plan for folks.
“Traffic from links is not and instant solution, it takes time and effort. The winning points here is it’s free and you will be rewarded for your efforts over time….”
You can check out Paul’s website at http://www.digitalawol.com
How can linking help local businesses?
I have already written two articles on local linking.
I will let you run over there to read the articles.
Note: I have just driven 1000 miles to visit my family and start a summer vacation for the next week…so posting will be light.
One of the things that really excites me about local search (and social, mobile, etc components) is how much it can really help your website. In addition to listing pertinent business information, it is a quick and easy way to get links pointing to your website.
By now, I assume everyone has heard about linking building and why it is important to your website. Just in case you have not, getting links pointing to your website or blog is critical for your search engine rankings. You can’t just have any links though, you need to have links from sites that are somehow related or relevant to your content.
I am going to get more involved discussing linking and how it ties in with local search later, but it was on my mind today so I wanted to introduce the idea. I am putting together an article on the subject also. If you need some basic info on linking, see one of my websites Linking101.com
Any time you can get links to your website from high traffic directories or related sites, go for it. In addition to getting links from directories or local search engines, you can exchange links or purchase links from relevant sites. So remember with local search you are killing two birds with one stone (links & critical business data!) More to come on linking soon :)
