In the last few months at Inspire Consulting, we've been working with a large number of business owners who are relatively new to the Internet. When it comes to their website, these business owners all have one question in common: how will people find my website once it is launched?
Although specific promotion strategies vary from business to business, they do have a few common elements, one of which involves ensuring effective use of links on your site.
Links are important for a number of reasons. Firstly, they help people navigate your site and find the content they're interested in. Secondly, links from other websites to your own website will help increase your site's traffic. Thirdly, links are one of the central factors in determining how your site is ranked in search engines, and with the majority of Internet users beginning their sessions online with a search, search engine optimization is a really important issue for your site.
Clearly, you need to give some thought to how your site uses links.
What is a Link?
Simply put, a link is a part of a web page that directs you to a new page. Most navigation on the internet is done through links.
Links can generally be broken down into two main categories: internal and external. External links are links from other sites to your own, while internal links are links from a page in your site to another page within your site. For the most part we'll be looking at external links.
Why are links important for search engines?
In the early days of search engines you had to submit your site manually to a search engine or directory (such as Alta Vista or Yahoo), usually along with the category you wanted to be listed under. This system became less manageable as the number of sites on the internet grew and the original method of assessing the content of a website (relying on the technical "meta-tag" information provided by whoever created the website) was deemed unreliable and too easy to manipulate.
Google revolutionized the search engine industry when it was launched because it relied on links, firstly to find each website and, secondly, to help decide how important or relevant a site was.
Google's basic principle was that you could use the "democracy" of the internet to judge each website: a site with no external links is not regarded as useful by any other site, while a site with lots of external links is well thought of and more likely to contain useful information.
How does it work?
Google (along with many other search engines) traces through all the links on a website and follows each one until it finds no new links. If any of the links that are found point to a new website, Google goes to that site and starts the process again. This is often referred to as "spidering" or "crawling" the web.
You can usually see when search engine spiders (or robots) have been through your site because the spiders will be named in your website logs.
So all I need to do is get my site listed on lots of other pages?
Not so fast. Technically that is true, but what happened was that people aiming to manipulate their search engine ranking started setting up websites full of links – these became known as "link farms". The search engines realized that links from these pages were a lot less useful compared to links from "normal" sites and so they adjusted their processes to take this into account.
Now search engines use the importance of the site making the link as a factor in determining the overall importance of the site receiving the link – so some links are definitely more useful than others!
The ideal situation is to get links from sites that relate to your business or are aimed at your target market – any industry specific sites are particularly useful.
How do I go about that?
The most common way to arrange an external link is by talking to (or emailing) the person who runs the website where you would like to be listed. Of course just as you can't prevent anyone linking to your site, you also can't force anyone to give you a link – and many businesses would want you to link from your website to theirs in return (described as "reciprocal links").
Another factor to be aware of is that the text in the link is important when it comes to deciding what information your site contains (and therefore what keywords you are considered relevant for). Many links will use your company name, which is accurate (because your website will be about your company), but not ideal. What is more useful for your rankings is a link that describes what you do. For example, if you run a travel agency called Buena Vista Holidays, but you specialize in package deals to Spain, a link using "Buena Vista Holidays" would be helpful but not as good as a link with the text "Spanish Package Holidays and Tours" with the company name next to, but not part of, the link itself.
The most successful way to arrange this is to provide websites that are going to link with you with pre-prepared code.
How do I find out who is linking to me?
The search engines themselves can let you find out which sites they have found that link to your site. Simply enter the word "link" followed by a colon, and then the domain name you wish to check. For example, to search for sites that link to CNN's website, enter the following as your search: link:www.cnn.com.
How do I find out which links are successful?
Take a look at your log files – these should show you "referrers" to your site. A referrer is a site that has a link to your website and it registers on your website statistics when someone clicks on the link.
By keeping an eye on the different referrers, you should quickly get a good idea which of your links are bringing new visitors to your website.
You might also see quite a few email programs turning up in the referrer section of your web logs. Anyone clicking on a link to your website from an email that they are reading over the internet (such as through Hotmail or any web-based email service) will create a "referral" like this.
What about internal links?
Internal links should not be overlooked, although they aren't quite as significant as external links. But with internal links you have complete control over how the link appears. Although you need to make sure all your links are clear to follow, you can still include useful keywords. For example, although it wouldn't make sense to rename your home page link to anything other than "home", you could change a link to your Frequently Asked Questions page from "FAQ" to "Spanish Holidays FAQ".
Internal links are vital because you want to make sure the search engines find all of the content on your website – and the search engines tend to place less emphasis on pages that are more than a couple of clicks away from the home page.
The best way to make sure that search engines can find all the pages in your website is to have a site map. A site map is a web page (ideally linked to directly form your home page) which lists (and links to) all the pages in your website.
How can I encourage more websites to link to me?
Content, content, content. Look at this question the other way round – what would you want from a website to encourage you to link to it? I know I want sites that provide helpful, relevant services to my target visitors and sites that have useful, free information.
If you write to other website owners to request a link, make sure you give a reason why they might want to link, and why their visitors would find your site helpful. Instead of linking directly to the home page, you could suggest linking to a free report or article, or a newsletter sign-up page. Online tools (for example a mortgage calculator) are also very useful and would be popular targets for links – just make sure the material is relevant to what you do.
Posted on
Thursday, July 17, 2008 1:08 PM