Building links is about being aggressive, putting in some work consistently. It’s important to know a few facts about link building and form a solid plan of attack before spending a lot of your time submitting here or linking there.
Establishing incoming links to your website from well respected, highly ranked sites does a few things for your small business website. One thing it does is bring visitors. All high ranking sites will probably be accompanied by many pre-qualified visitors. Another thing links can do is transfer some of that high ranking respect called pagerank on to your site. This is one way Google determines a sites value and position when potential customers are searching. A pan is needed because like anything some things work and some don’t or don’t hold much value.
The Plan of Attack
Online directories often list websites according to category and geological location. Submit to the top 5 free directories with the best pagerank. If you have the budget consider some paid directories like Yahoo.com, Business.com, and GoGuides.com. Start with Dmoz.org for the free ones and grab a current list of the top pageranked free directories. Submit to as many as you can but atleast the top few. Online directories that are specific to your niche may be even more valuable than highly pageranked sites so watch for directories that focus on your subject.
Social media is booming, don’t get left out. Although time consuming this can be a great way to get the word out about your small business. Services like Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook allow some forms of automation too. For example a WordPress blog plugin that automatically posts to your Twitter. Take advantage of automation and/or spend time on social media sites in between tasks. Twitter takes 2 seconds to update and can be done from a phone, browser, desktop, Linux terminal, and other places. Not to mention it can keep clients, costumers, and co-workers informed about what’s happening with the company.
Writing articles that are relevant to your small business and its field is the surest way that I’ve found to drive traffic. Whether it’s sub 300 word blog posts about the new products features or an in-depth 5 page review about the companies history, you’ve got to get words on the page. Preferably keywords. Simply writing the articles will result in much slower traffic than if you promote your articles. I recommend setting up a plan for submissions too. Pick 5 sites that accept article submissions, tutorials, how to’s, news or anything else you can post on their site. Some sites post the entire article with a author area with a link and the good ones only post half the article and make the customer click to your site to read the rest. The ladder allows you to enjoy a significant traffic spike while the article is featured or displayed on the article submission site(s) and in some cases a steady stream for a long time. Remember that articles that draw comments, inspire, or help someone(tutorial), are the ones that are going to draw the most with traffic.
I recommend staying up with the latest online trends and repeating these practices as much as possible. Consistency is key for article submissions and for getting search engines respect.
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