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Link building is one of those things that you know you need to do to help rankings and get more traffic to your website, but something that always gets put to the bottom of the list. A necessary evil!
One of the reasons why I think many businesses don’t tackle link building is because of the confusion that surrounds it. Some of the business owners I speak to get confused about links on their own site pointing to other sites and links pointing back to their own website.
When it comes to adding links on your own website that point to other sites, you can link to whichever site you want to link to, as long as you’re happy to list that site on your website (so don’t just link to any old site if you get link requests, only if you’re happy to do so). However, including links to other sites from yours won’t help with your ‘link popularity’ (search engine rankings through quality links), or help drive traffic to your website.
Gaining those all important links has become increasingly difficult over the last couple of years. In the past, web directories such as DMOZ (Open Directory) and Yahoo used to be great places to gain links from, but these links are becoming less and less valuable, so it’s not really worth the time and effort of submitting your site to the many free directories that are out there.
When starting out building links to your site, think about your target market and where they might be. List the websites that are prominent in your industry and may have somewhere on the site you could gain a link from. Are there forums and social networking sites within your industry? Make sure you’re listed on those. Approach sites which offer complementary products or services to yours – they can be great places for links and drive targeted traffic. Doing some PR? Links from PR campaigns can be extremely valuable not only in terms of the quality of the links, but the traffic too.
So before you start submitting your website to all those free directories you find (and have probably never heard of!), really think about who you’re marketing to, so that you don’t waste time gaining links from sites that not only will probably never be found, but will send no traffic to your website.
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
There are actually quite a few directories out there that can still be valuable as sources for one way links but they’re either paid (like Yahoo) or almost impossible to get into (like DMOZ). For commercial sites, it’s a good idea to submit to them anyway, because it’s far harder to get natural links pointing back to a site with product offerings (even with a blog) than to purely informational sites. Passing up a valuable directory because of the stigma is a mistake: Take all the links on quality sites you can possibly get.
Hi Vern, thanks for your comment!
I agree that it’s the quality of links that’s important and there are some good directories out there which will send traffic to sites. However, there are also a lot of lower quality directories which will never help towards link popularity or send any traffic despite being free to submit to. I would advise small businesses to spend their time trying to gain links from the quality ones rather than ones which won’t ever help with traffic or link popularity.