DesignerMark Blog

The internet was built on the principle of links and that really hasn’t changed. From a business perspective, you may think that you want any visitors to yourself – and of course that is true. As an analogy, why would you have flyers or adverts for someone else within your own shop or reception room? But selective linking to relevant websites can do an awful lot of good for your site and, crucially, give you the opportunity to ask for links back to you.

It’s important to note that links coming back in to your website are THE major factor that search engines (Google in particular) will look at when it comes to giving you a good page rank.Therefore the more “inbound links” you can get, the better it will be for the visibility of your site.

The mechanics that Google uses are deeper than simply having lots of links back to your site – they have to be relevant, and ideally they have to come from a source that has high traffic.

So it’s no good just setting up 100 small sites of your own and putting links back to your main site, unless those 100 “support sites” are going to generate a lot of traffic, which is unlikely if you are creating them just to try and pull a trick on Google! It’s a clever self-regulating system (as most of Google’s systems are!) which rewards good sites and sites where the effort has been put in to make them visible naturally.

Some things you could consider for improving your own websites rank in Google:-

• Contact website owners who offers services and products or advice related to, but not in direct competition with, your own service. Offer them a “reciprocal link” (which is where your links page comes in). You need to get lots of them and pick sites that look well established for the greatest effect.
• Find some relevant or national “business directories” and get your website listed with them. Some will charge but many are free. If the directory is a popular one then it will have lots of traffic, which will benefit your site very well.
• Offer local newspapers (or National!), relevant blogs or websites, to do an editorial for your product and publish it with links to your website.
• Start to frequent the biggest internet forums for your field of activity… read some posts, see if you can get a feel for the atmosphere and visitors or problems people are having. See if you can answer any questions people have and get involved in the community. Become a “trusted” member over time… then importantly add a small description of what you do and a link to your website in your profiles signature so that each time you make a post, your signature is included. You can add the signature after you have made several posts and it will apply it to all your previous posts so it’s often a better idea to start slowly as forums don;t generally like blatant advertising and you may well get banned for anything too “salesy” so tread carefully. Usually if you are informative and helpful you will be alright! This will get more, RELEVANT, people to see your link AND help with search engine rank.
• You may benefit from creating a banner advert (DesignerMark can help there!) and submitting it to a banner ad delivery service such as any of the main players listed here: http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=uk+banner+ad+service&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=3aa7b5ddeb415f6e - this will cost but CAN be effective if the advert is designed well
• Google AdWords can be a VERY effective way of getting visitors to your site, but if handled wrong can also be very costly (or rather not cost-effective, becuase you can set daily limits so that you don’t overspend). I will be writing a more detailed post on AdWords soon as it is really a subject all of it’s own, requiring quite a lot of thought and planning to harness the “Black Art” of effective advert management!

All of the above takes time to build up and you may feel some approaches are not suitable for you, but if you have a plan and stick to it, it needn’t be overwhelming!