With all the advances in technology your business can go from being a thought to an real business with a website, logo and business cards within a day. When I started my business over 3 years ago I was amazed at how much I could get done with Vistaprint. I was able to get 500 business cards for about $10.00! There are many more services available to small business owner’s today. Moo.com is the new Vistaprint offering custom cards. As soon as you register your domain you will be inundated with requests for your money to save you time. SEO Strategy companies offering you free assessments of your site, Online listing services offering to get you listed on over 50 sites with just a click of a button. You know you need to optimize your site, but do you need to pay an arm and a leg for it? One of the best ways to gain page rank organically is to have back links, or links to your site, thus increasing the relevance and page rank of your site based on the referring sites linked to it. I have received many requests to pay to have my site back linked to a network of sites to improve my ranking quickly. I was tempted, but I wanted to see what the experts thought about link building so I did a little research and here are the results.
To understand the need for back linking you have to understand the usage or importance of a link. If you compare the internet to the US, your site would be considered a great hole in the wall microbrewery. I’m in Washington D.C. but you are in northern California. The Natural Bohemian (Natty Boh) brewery is just a short drive up 295, it’s convenient easily accessible and familiar so I buy from them constantly. A friend from California comes to visit and brings a 6 pack of your beer from California and I am hooked. I go online and buy a case, and the next time I visit California I make it a point to visit the actual brewery. My friend from California supplied that link that lead me to your brewery. This is the same with back links to your site, if your site is new no one is referring to your site for information or for services so your relevance is low. My friend created a link to your brewery/site. My friend was a trusted source so the conversion rate was high. This is the same thing as with link building links from influencers, authorities on the industry and educators confirm the relevance of your site. But how do you build these links? Moz.com has a detailed strategy that goes the natural route but is very effective.
1.) Natural Editorial Links: These are other sources linking to your site as a resource.
2.)Manual Outreach: These are links that you manual contact a blogger, website etc and ask a back link to your site.
3.)Self Created: These are links that are created by sites that have guest book sign-ins or blog comments. These can be plentiful but
have low value.
If you are looking at the list you can see how daunting a task link building can be. With that in mind, most SEO Strategist and Small Business owners will opt for the pay per link model. Google, Bing and other Search Engine frown upon this option. The reason being, you may be linked to low quality sites that may not be related to your site simply trying to trick the system. As most Web Masters and SEO Consultants know, Google’s refresh will always catch up to you. If is found that you have paid for link building then your site will be effected significantly.
Although the thought of paying for such a task seems wise, the consequences could be extreme. It takes a long time to build relevant quality links, but manually building links is the only way to go. The best way to achieve this is to create quality, useful content and others will link to your site. You may not be able to afford the cost of the alternative.
Juan De Cruz, Jr.
http://www.socialmediajuander.com
jdecruz@socialmediajuander.com
(240) 479-0082