Link Building 101 – How it Will Help Your Company Sell More on the Web
September 3, 2006
- Strong external links come from authoritative websites – CNN, Wikipedia, or whatever authority websites there are in our community. If I am selling a book about beekeeping, how about an external link from the American Beekeeping Federation. Also, a popular forum or blog about beekeeping would bring plenty of potential customers that may be interested in my information.
- Relevant external links – The general rule of thumb is to seek links from websites whose traffic may result in a sale for us. We look for related, but non-competing products and services. What is considered a relevant website can be much broader than we may imagine if our staff member is quite creative in their link building practices.
- Volume of external links – Possibly the most misunderstood part of link building. More votes will generally bring higher rankings, but only if the links have a good mix of authoritative and relevant links. There are products out there that promise to submit to a bajillion free-for-all links pages. Sheer volume of easy-to-get links will not help a website for the long haul. It may even hurt us. There is evidence that search engines like Google (Yahoo and MSN aren’t far behind) are tracking these types of pages, and penalizing sites that appear to have unnatural linking practices.