Building Links

The topic of today is expanding your “web presence” on the internet.  You’ve probably heard about “inbound links” but how do they improve your relevancy to Google? How do you apply this idea?  Well, dogs have been using something very similar for centuries. Although it’s a crude example, it will serve.

Dogs pee to mark their territory with their “name.” The more trees they mark, the bigger their “presence”. Let’s say the dog’s named Gizmo.  Every tree Gizmo pees on, makes Gizmo’s “presence” bigger.  He moves from being Little Gizmo to being Big Gizmo (even if he’s a chihuahua.) Eventually, after enough trees, he becomes King Gizmo despite his small size.

Having just a website is simliar to having marked just one tree. Answerbag says that in a 2008 report by Google, it estimates the internet is growing by several billion pages a day. At this time Google has indexed more than a trillion unique web page URL’s.   What do we learn from this? Your web presence of one tree isn’t going to be enough. And every business owner needs a link building strategy for their enterprise social media campaign.

Link Building Strategies

That’s the bad news. The good news is you can actively make your website more findable and relevant to a small or large number of hot prospects.  You just have to locate the trees. One of the online trees you can target are other relevant blogs and social networks. By finding these blogs and socially enabled sites, engaging in relevant conversation and leaving a trail back to your site in the form of your name and your website address (URL), you can make your mark.

Google checks all the trees and makes a cross-indexed list of their locations. So when somebody wants a chihuahua, Google checks the list of trees and says, “King Gizmo is your dog.”

Having an effective marketing plan online must, must, must include building links to your site. While it’s not hard to build links yourself, sometimes finding the right trees (blogs and comments on social media networks) can be challenging. And not all inbound links are given the same value by Google. So being able to evaluate the quality of the potential link before you create it can be useful. To do that you may need some advanced software or the help of a knowledgable inbound marketing consultant that understands long tail keyword research and inbound links.