SageRock Web Marketing Blog

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Link Building

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about link building. Do you know that there are some search engine marketing firms that all they do is build links for people? They don’t touch any content on your site, they don’t touch any titles. They just go out and get links to your web site. That is how important links are. It was very evident in the 2004 presidential election because the number one web site for the word failure was the George Bush biography page on the WhiteHouse.gov site. The number one listing for waffle was John Kerry’s web site. Neither of those guys had those words on their web site; it was just all about other people using those words to link to them. There is no denying the power of link building. You can use that information for good. My strategy for link building is completely above the board, I do not recommend doing anything sneaky or tricky. I do not recommend buying or trading links. I certainly do not recommend link farms, where you put your site in with thousands of other sites and you put those sites somewhere buried on your site. That is a guaranteed way to get removed from a search engine. It is all ethical, ethical, ethical. The search engines hate the fact that people are manipulating an otherwise great way of ranking their web sites. If you think about it, link building is how we work in the world. So, somebody comes to you and asks for a recommendation for a good restaurant. You aren’t going to recommend a terrible restaurant, it’s your reputation. You are going to tell them about the nice little Italian place they should check out. That is what link building, link popularity was. This was the basis of the theory, if somebody, an important web site, linked to your site; you are probably of some importance too. This was how Google changed the entire search engine landscape. Before Google it was mostly about what was on the web site. Then Google came along, you went to Google, you typed in a phrase you were looking for, and then the results you wanted came up. It was a novel thing, that search engines actually worked. In the future we are probably going to see artificial intelligence based on link building as well. It is how we relate to the world, and it makes sense that that is how machines relate to the world. Obviously, search engine optimizers who are less than ethical have realized this and are trying to trick the engines, get links they don’t deserve, so it is an ongoing fight. From our standpoint, when we are doing a link building campaign, the first thing you need is something worthwhile that people want to link to. If you have a three page site about your company that is not interesting at all, you are not going to get links. Who wants to link to that? You need to have some sort of resource, some sort of valuable information that people would find useful to link to. So, you get that, you get something creative and useful. This is not a build it and they will come type of thing. I have tried that and it doesn’t work. You need to go out and ask for the links. You go to related sites, sites that would want to link to you and you ask them if they would consider linking to your web site. Get a little spreadsheet and go out to the engines and start finding potential web sites that might be good candidates for linking to you. So, in one column you put all of the sites, in the next you put the date submitted, the next column any comments, then a resubmission, finally a date accepted column. That way you can keep track of these sorts of things. That is how I would go about it, it’s not rocket science, it’s just good old fashioned hard work. You can do it, and it’s crucial. If you don’t get links, you are not going to do as well as your competitors who went out to get them. So, start up a link building campaign, you are going to be glad you did because you are going to get traffic from these web sites and you are going to be rewarded on the search engines. I hope this helps, if you have any other questions you can call me at 330-379-900 or email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. Thank you for listening, thank you for coming to our site, we have a lot of great information here. I hope you find it useful. Have a great day

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.