Link Building

Increasing the number of targeted visitors to your website is very important to the overall success of your site. To do this, many business’ are focused very heavily on search engine positioning, trying to ensure that they have front-page listings at Google, Yahoo and the other major engines. Whilst this is important to do, it can be costly to achieve, and is quite often done at the expense of other methods of increasing exposure and traffic to a website.

A comprehensive link-building campaign, which involves having as many sites as possible linking back to your own website, is one of those methods that is often overlooked. Link building is a very important step in achieving online success, for a number of reasons:

1. Following links from other websites is the second most common method (behind search engine positioning) through which a user will find a website; and
   
   
2. The more links, and the better the quality of those links, the better the positioning in the search engines

Perhaps even more importantly, generally the only investment in conducting a link-building campaign is your time, rather than your money!

OK, so how do you find sites to link to us? What type of websites should you be looking for? Do you need to link back to other sites?

The logical first step is to find a comprehensive list of websites to link to, by looking at the following areas:

• Websites that complement your products/services, content or target audience
  
  Eg. For a website that retails beach towels, this may be sites that offer beach bags, suntan cream, information on travel locations etc.
  
  
• Websites which offer the opportunity to review/showcase your products/services
  
  Eg. For a Melbourne restaurant website, this may be websites that review restaurants, or sites which offer information on where to go in Melbourne.
  
  
• Websites that your competitors link to, or receive links from; and
  
  
• Websites of professional organizations, chambers of commerce etc. that your business is a member of.

By following these guidelines, you should be able to put together a lengthy list of potential websites to link to.

What is the next step?

Simply, you must contact everyone on this list, personally, and ask them whether they would be prepared to link back to your website. In return, you can offer them a link back to their own website, referred to as ‘reciprocal linking’.

The most efficient method to contact them is via email, and you should be able to find email contact details on all of the websites you have on your list. Your email should include:

• Information about your website (address, owner, products/services);
  
• Reasons for contacting them (asking for reciprocal links); and
  
• The page on your website where the link back to their website will be placed.

When asking for the link, describe exactly how you would like the link to be presented. Always ask for some of your relevant keywords and phrases to be included in the link, as this will help with the search engine rankings for these particular words.

Some other issues to consider when requesting links:

• Always follow up businesses that have not responded to your initial request. Allow some time to pass, perhaps 1-2 weeks, before doing so, so as not to irritate the person at the other end. But if they are potentially a great alliance to your website, do not be put off if they do not initially respond;
  
  
• Start by trying to send your email to the owner/manager of the website. If you cannot locate contact details for that person, send the email to the sales department, and ask them to forward it on to the appropriate person;
  
  
• Never, ever link to ‘link farms’, or websites that offer to boost your link popularity. These are considered ‘spam’ by the search engines: websites created to specifically fool the search engines into thinking a website has more links than it actually does. Anyone found on these link farms will be automatically removed from a search engine’s database. This is what we mean when we suggest to only look for ‘quality’ links; and
  
  
• You should wait until the website is completely built before contacting any potential link partners, otherwise they will more than likely refuse your request.
  
  
• Always remember to use standard business etiquette, and thank any website that has agreed to link to you. Chances are you may need to contact them in the future, perhaps to ask for the link to be updated, or to change the page to which they are linking etc. If you have shown etiquette when dealing with them, obviously all future relations have a better chance of going smoothly.

If you follow the guidelines outlined above, you will be well on the way to both increasing visitor numbers to the website, and improving your search engine positioning.

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