Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [195]
This provided a highly targeted method of gaining links. By building relationships with bloggers or publishers at other online publications, businesses could gain visibility in an online article, complete with a link or two to their website. The combination of gaining an article about a company or product and gaining a link to the website creates a very high-quality link. That link provides branding, provides lead generation, and positively affects rankings!
The benefits of this targeted approach are many, but very much like link baiting, there are some common elements. The most common is the time involved to carefully craft the content that others will find compelling. The next step is to develop the pitch to the news source, a blogger, or an editor. These things take time, and hastily created content and pitches are rarely effective.
Review Your Internal Links
Up to this point, the majority of information on building links has focused on external linking. This section will cover building your internal links. Building internal links in your content pages to other pages within your website can be an effective way of helping users and increasing rankings. However, please do not get over-aggressive or eager and think that changing all of your site’s content into links will increase your rankings. That’s not at all what I am recommending.
Not all engines value internal site links the same. When optimizing internal links on a website, I usually have seen improvement in Yahoo! and Bing, but not as much in Google. Remember to always do what is best for the user, and the search engines will follow. Moderation is the key, and it is better to be cautious than to do too much.
There are many “overlooked” opportunities within a website that can add value to the visitor experience and help strengthen the internal anchor text of a website. The first thing to do is to simply review areas of the website that can benefit from adding links into already existing content.
One area that always tends to be overlooked is the FAQ page. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page contains questions and answers that are relevant to the website visitors. However, I am amazed that so few FAQ pages actually contain links from the answers to the section of the website that further answers the question. When you consider helping the visitor, this is an area that is sure to benefit.
Other areas are typical online publishing tools—related articles, most popular articles, most commented articles, most popular articles this month, most popular products, and so on. These are all categories that can increase visitor engagement by linking to relevant content, whatever the interest. Common themes in subject matter, popularity, and timeliness are all relevant to people, so simply adding navigation links with properly optimized titles can add to both longer engagement on your website and better rankings for your specific subject areas.
Friday: Evaluate the Marketing Value of Your Links
To focus on a campaign for link development and marketing your website, the issues of time constraints, content resources, and campaign direction need to be defined. Otherwise, there is no measurable gain and no defined path toward a goal.
Define the Goal
Knowing this, the place to start is to define the desired outcome from a link. This can be a conversion such as a sale, a completed lead form, or a registration. When comparing visitors who come from different sources, measure them by the same goal. This may sound logical, but many people miss that important point. Most marketers tend to use time on site and page views as an important measurement metric, but those two methods are a very incomplete method of measurement. By themselves, they do not provide much in the way of valuable analysis because the intent is difficult to ascertain. By measuring a goal, you measure the final product