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Link Strategies Will Improve Rank Issues

July 23, 2009 by Susan Hamilton Leave a Comment

Sharing links is a pretty common way to show interesting, fun, or informative sites to friends, associates. We don’t usually think about how that helps the website we link to, we just do it. Some research on a site we’ve been slowly upgrading revealed another common situation. The website wasn’t ranking.

As I shared what I had learned with the small business owner, I realized that all my words were falling on deaf ears. It can be hard to wrap your head around what it takes to be found online.

I wanted him to know that smart linking strategies can offset costs associated with marketing a company. Yes, you can, and should, hire a company to help you build links, but you can do some of it yourself and increase results while saving some bucks.

Think of link building as social networking with your friends for entertainment.

Engaging with your friends, there’s no real goal other than sharing stuff. When you’re marketing however, the goal is to move closer to the top of the search results page, or SERP. You have goals, but basically you’re sharing.

Here’s the situation.

This site I’m referring to had been optimized for a particular phrase, and like most things associated with technology, the keyword relevance changed. The words they were using for their link building efforts began to matter less. Usually you can chalk that up to mass use of a word or phrase beyond what you can compete with.

In this instance, another company in the same area and industry had used ‘black hat’ methods of outranking our client’s site, and had seriously knocked him down several pages using the really great terms we had optimized for. That’s going to work for black hat guy until the engines realize junk and clutter don’t keep people on his page. That website will be knocked to the bottom for a long time.

But for now, it hurts our client and we had to do something about it. If you’re not on the first page, don’t mess around. It can take a lot to get back in the ring.

Start Finding Great Places to Leave Your Links
Besides the obvious keyword research update, a site in this scenario has a real shot of outranking the other company with a good linking strategy.

More links from higher authority websites back to yours will improve the situation. Search engine spiders recognize links being developed over time; they see that a site is referenced as people go 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 be penalized by not being crawled. That won’t help.

It’s not just using the right keywords. If it was just keywords, your website language would be enough. Keywords change and have to be updated occasionally, and links go bad and have to be checked occasionally.

There were low number of links due to the newness of the site, but it wasn’t getting indexed often enough for other reasons, too. That site had been neglected, without:

1. Using their blog
2. Updating the blog 2-3 times per week
3. Commenting on other relevant blogs and leaving their website link
4. Article marketing with links back to the website

Are you struggling to build back links? Share your horror stories below.

Related Articles: New Feature: Small Business Marketing Links

Photo Credit: Robert Brook on Flickr

About Susan Hamilton

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