Using linking in your search engine marketing efforts

Having relevant high quality sites link to your web pages will help their search engine rankings. But how do you get them to link back to you?

By Pandia Guest Writer Peter Larmey

(November 2004) In 1991 Parker Bros. and McDonald's began cross-promoting the Monopoly game with the food chain giant, launching a marketing campaign that would prove remarkably successful for years to come.

During that first year there were reports that people who would normally visit two times a week on a regular basis began going a nausea-inducing six times a week. The two brands became associated with each other. They became linked.

The McDonald's/Monopoly promotion is an example of a successful offline partnership, but sites do something similar every day through linking programs.

Linking is just another form of relationship building and bringing both customers and search engines to your site -- continuously. And if customers think your site is worth coming to, so will the search engines.

But you know all that already. In fact, you've got sites linking back to you right now. Four or five, at least. One of them owned by your brother Paul who runs a hardware story in Poughkeepsie.

If this describes you, then there are two words which you'll want to dwell upon: linking strategy. A good linking strategy will not only help to greatly improve your rankings, but it may just help enhance your company's image in the minds of customers, prospects, and the web community as a whole.

Thinking Linking

When many website owners consider linking, it's usually something along the lines of "whoa, here's something that says 'link to your site.' I think I'll try that." Click. Done.

What they should be thinking is, "how do I promote my site through a comprehensive, well-organized, and well thought-out linking strategy that will not only improve my rankings but enhance my brand image as well? Oh -- and attract the right visitors!"

In the end, linking is really just another means of marketing, because through linking you are trying to get other visitors to come to your site. You are also trying to enhance your search engine rankings so you can get even more visitors to come to your site. Therefore, you should consider some of the tenets of traditional marketing and apply them to your online efforts:

• Partnerships: In traditional marketing, would you really partner with a company that has nothing to do with what you offer? Or, heaven forbid, a direct competitor? Where's the sense in that?
• Branding: A cornerstone of traditional branding is association, and how customers perceive your company. Speaking in "real world"terms, if you're a steak house, do you want to partner with a burger joint? Probably not the image you're trying to project.

The Linking Relationship

Take a look at sites with a Google PageRank of five or above, and you'll notice several things, including compelling content, a professional look, and, generally, an impressive number of backward links.

This is not a coincidence. A good looking site, with loads of interesting content, will always be ranked well and tend to receive a good amount of traffic. These are sites that you will want to have a relationship with. If you mimic their passion for creativity, they will want to have a relationship with you.

Make no mistake, linking is a relationship. Sites reciprocate links so that they can achieve higher rankings and attract more customers. They look for win-win situations.

How do you build these relationships? Many site developers perceive the initiation of a linking program as a ton of work. It is, but perhaps not in the way that they think.

The traditional means of exploring linking partnerships is through standard request emails along the lines of "Dear Webmaster, I am interested in..." However, to paraphrase Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come."

Efficient link tactics

Instead of focusing all of your energy on sending out emails to webmasters you've never met, channel that energy into developing a site that is so good and informative that third parties will want to link to you. For example:

• Build a blog: Blogs are great tools for sharing information. They're extremely popular with web users, and can be optimized for search engines. How many blog pages are indexed by search engines? A Google on the term "blog"recently turned back over 59 million entries. Clearly, they're getting linked and picked up.
• Write a newsletter: Newsletters are great for providing product, company, and general information. Sites love to link back to relevant information. Not only that, but incorporate some keywords in there and you have a well-optimized page.
• Give some "tips and tricks": No matter what type of site you have, you more than likely have an opportunity to develop a page that provides "tips and tricks"to potential customers. If you're a health care site, why not provide some healthy living tips? If you sell lawn mowers, put some lawn care information online. Once again, great, useful content leads to great, useful linking partnerships.

Tactics to avoid

Likewise, there are some tactics which should be avoided, as they don't serve any business benefit whatsoever. These include linking to competitors' sites, linking to link farms (sites you often see that have no useful content, just a long list of links) -- heck, linking all over the place, in places that have no relevance to your business.

When exploring linking opportunities, don't just look at the search engine benefit, but at the business benefit, and ask yourself the same questions you would ask if you were partnering with a brick and mortar company. Will this partnership benefit me? Will it help me attract customers? Will it help enhance my brand recognition?

If you answer "no"to any of these, move on to another site.

Linking is the online equivalent of business development. Think of it as a means of getting your business recognized -- by both search engines and real, live customers -- through partnerships.

Done effectively, it can increase brand recognition and sales. Who knows? Maybe someday you'll make enough cash to be able to buy a hotel on Park Place.

Pete Larmey has over 10 years of marketing communications consulting experience. As a business consultant with KeywordRanking (a division of Websourced, Inc.), Pete helps clients develop effective search engine marketing programs designed to increase brand awareness and drive revenue.

Prior to KeywordRanking, Pete was an independent consultant, helping companies build successful public relations and interactive marketing campaigns. In 2000, he co-founded blast! PR, an independent public relations and marketing communications agency. Pete is also the author of several articles focusing on interactive advertising and online privacy issues. Pete can be reached at plarmey@keywordranking.com.

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Using RSS-feeds for generating backlinks

As Pete Larmey points out in this article, having a blog or a news column greatly increases the chances that someone will be linking to you.

One reason for this is that there are other bloggers out there that are looking for news, and if you are there first with the good stuff, many of them will link to you.

However, this means that they will have to find you. Many web site owners and editors will not visit your site every day, even if you bring them news content on a daily basis.

This is why you should make an RSS feed. An RSS is a XML text file that presents the latest headlines from your site with links and a short description. These feeds can be read by special RSS readers, often used by bloggers and journalists looking for news.

If you provide a good service, some sites may even decide to include your RSS feed on their own site in form of a list of headline links. Unless these headlines are generated by a javascript feed, the search engines will find them, adding more relevant backlinks to your article pages.

Just make sure that the headlines (and through them the links are keyword rich and relevant).