People talk often about linking. Linking from one site to another is a pretty common way to show interesting, fun, or informative sites to friends, associates, and even networks on many social sites and emails. I did some research on a site we’ve been upgrading lately, and another common situation came up. As I shared what I had learned with the small business owner, I realized that all the nodding was due to complete and total misunderstanding of how, exactly, linking strategies can offset costs associated with marketing a company.

When you’re working with SEO companies or researching and employing those techniques on your own site, its similar, but not exactly like social networking with your friends for entertainment. When engaging with your friends, there’s no real goal other than to share the information. When you’re marketing however, the goal is to gain authority to your website by the search engine so that you move closer to the top of the search engine research page, or SERP. We need to be on the first page because most searchers don’t get past the first page before they re-enter the search query to try again. If you’re not on the first page, you don’t exist.

This site I’m referring to had initially been optimized for a particular phrase, and like most things associated with technology, the keyword relevance  changed. In this instance, another company in the same business had used ‘black hat’ methods of outranking our client’s site, and had seriously knocked us down several pages. That’s going to work for him until the engines realize what’s been done, and then he will be knocked to the bottom for a long time. So, it hurts our client now and we have to do something about it. What?

How does linking improve rank?
Besides the obvious keyword research update, a site in this scenario has a real shot of outranking the impostor with a good linking strategy. This can be paid for by hiring a good content marketing company, but it can also be done by you, over time, if you’ve got the time to dedicate to it. The more links from other websites back to your site gain it authority by the search engine spiders.  When they see those links, and more coming to it, and the linking increases, they see that searchers are going to it for real, relevant information, and that’s authority. It takes time to build that up naturally, and you don’t want to do anything unnaturally or you can hurt yourself more than help.

Its not just using the right keywords, although that is pretty important. Its also about using an effective linking strategy. Keywords change and have to be updated occasionally, and links go bad and have to be checked occasionally. Using keywords in your links as anchor text is also very important, but you can only control what you link from page to page within your own site or to another site. To give you an idea of what we were up against, one of our outranking competitors had well over 600 inbound links, and our client had 12.

One reason for the low number of links was the newness of the site, but the other reasons had to do with how long that site had just been sitting there without:

1. using a blog
2. updating the blog 2-3 times per week
3. commenting on other relevant blogs and leaving links
4. article submissions referring to the site using, you guessed it, links!

Its easy to find yourself there, as a business owner or marketing director of your company. There are PPC methods to get you to the top also. But this post recognizes that we need to be resourceful today. Successful linking strategies take time and repetition to build, but with dedication your site can become optimized for your customers’ needs.

Related Articles: New Feature: Small Business Marketing Links

Photo Credit: Robert Brook on Flickr