“Many customers of BreakAway credited their interest in working with us to the professionalism of our website.”
Doug Whatley - CEO - BreakAway Ltd.
Drive Traffic To Your Website With High-Quality Links
By Tom Warthen – President, ProSite Web Design LLC - www.prositewebdesign.com
Potential customers are searching the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week looking for your products and services.
Make it easy for customers to find your website
One of the best ways to ensure that your site is easily found is to improve its search ranking with inbound links.
In general, the more links there are to your website the higher the site tends to rank in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. Each link equals a vote of confidence, increasing your site's credibility in the eyes of the search engines, moving your site up in the rankings, and increasing visibility to your customers.
Key point: Inbound links are an important part of optimizing your website for search engines. Read more Search Engine Optimization tips.
All links are not created equal
Search engine algorithms take into account a multitude of factors when ranking the billions of web pages across the Internet universe. A link from a New York Times article mentioning your business counts significantly more for your site's ranking than a link from your friend's personal web page.
Quantity, Quality and Relevance
Recent reports from Hitwise1 show Google capturing close to 70% of the overall online search activity and according to Google's own guidelines, "Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity."2
Key point: It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links.
You can create your own inbound links
Consider existing online sites relevant to your company or niche that provide excellent opportunities for inbound linkage to your website. You can generate your own quality links from industry message boards, forums, partner sites, local chamber sites, online press releases, blogs, ezine articles, and social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Digg.
Provide valuable content
The cornerstone to success is to provide value. As Google encourages, "The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page's visitors?"2
Make your content sharable
The viral nature of the web lends itself to sharing. AddThis is a free tool (see buttons above and below this article) that, when added to your website's pages, allows users to share your content with their network. Make sure to also promote your content to your own network via linked posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and your email marketing lists.
By creating, promoting, and sharing valuable content, the inbound links and visibility for your site will expand exponentially.
Tom Warthen is the President of ProSite Web Design LLC and has been helping businesses looking for a high return on their online marketing investment for over twelve years. To learn more about how to optimize your website, and to contact Tom for a free assessment, visit http://www.prositewebdesign.com.
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