Link development is the practice of increasing the amount of links pointing to your website. A link is usually a clickable piece of text or an image that directs you to something else online, including anything from another website, an image, a video, or anything else online for that matter.
Links are an important aspect of running a business online, especially for retailers, because of the way they inform search engines not only how popular your website is but also what it’s really about, which can be particularly beneficial for those stressing the design of their websites over content. This brings us to the fundamentals of search engine optimization.
Search Engine Optimization is a practice in which specialists hone everything about your website in order to inform the search engines what your site is about. Just as copywriters hone the content that appears in a magazine ad in order to connect with readers and in turn increase sales, search engine optimization specialists hone the content in a website in order to connect with the search engine, which in turn leads to a higher placement in their index, more exposure, and ultimately more sales.
While search engine optimization usually covers any type of link building strategy, the recent changes search engines have made introduced the need to look beyond search engine activity and focus elsewhere as well. One example is social activity — the activity surrounding your content or website on Twitter and Facebook are now viewed as signals to search engines, which they factor into their index and ranking process. So while it’s not exactly search engines optimization, it now plays a roll.
A few things to consider when thinking about the link development for your own brand:
Do you provide content (informational, entertaining, utility) people want to share?
Before you can attract links, you need to produce content worth sharing … why else do people share content with each other? Focus on creating content people want and need when approaching your own link development strategy. In addition to publishing it on your own website, you may want to consider publishing it elsewhere as well in order to tap into a pre-existing community of people.
Can people subscribe to your content?
If you have a blog, you know that people can subscribe (just like magazines subscribers) for free and receive notification when you publish new content. For those p[publishing content daily, this can become quite beneficial as it reminds people of your brand and provides value at the same time.
Social sharing buttons
Chances are you’ve seen a few social sharing buttons on your favorite websites or blogs — they’re the little buttons at the bottom of this post! They help readers share your content with their friends using their favorite social platform. For example, if you’re active on Facebook but not Twitter, you might choose to share this article with your friends on Facebook. If you’re active on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, you could even share content with all of them simultaneously.
Are you sharing your own content on and off site?
It’s easy to think of link development and search engine optimization as activity taking place off your site, because the goal is to increase links to your site, however, it’s important to remember that discover is a huge part of the web … especially the social web, so linking to your own related content throughout your content is a good way to encourage and enable visitors to do so. So when your visitor finds an article about fishing they enjoy, and it points to another article on your site about fishing bait, you’ll enable that visitor to explore that related content.
The reason to do this not only increases how valuable your site is to visitors (assuming your content is helpful), but it also helps search engines discover your content and add it to their index.
Overall, there are countless ways to go about your approach to link development, but keeping the mentioned points in mind will help you explore a diverse group of options.
Image credit: Noah Sussman