Right now you’re probably thinking of yourself as an accomplished website builder. But then you look at your Google Analytics report and you see that traffic is pathetically low and a quick check of your Google Webmaster Tool shows that you are not ranking well for any of your targeted keywords.
You Gotta Be Liked By The In Crowd
Making it easy for Google to find you doesn’t mean Google will love you once you two have your first meeting (or 2nd, or 3rd…). Google’s a bit of a snob and won’t recommend you as a return to a query unless you have a lot of great references from other great sites. Google makes an assumption that if other sites think enough of you to put a link to your site on their page, then your content must have some pretty good value. This whole “reference” deal is called backlinking and it is an essential part of SEO - specifically, off-page optimization. It's not good enough to just get any references; you’ve got to get references from the in crowd for Google to really take them serious.
So just what is the “in crowd” and why does Google think they’re so great? Well for starters Google looks at the domain extension of your backlinking sites and if you have a link coming in from a .gov or a .edu you are golden. Google considers sites with these extensions as authorities and assumes they wouldn’t link to your site unless you have really valuable content. More likely your links will come from .com, .net or .org and in those cases Google will look at their page rank (PR) and the higher the rank the more powerful the link. Backlinks from .info, .biz and all of the other non-traditional extensions carry little if any weight as a backlink. So the key is to get sites with good extensions and a higher PR than your own page to backlink to you. This can be tough. Since it's "off-page" you have less control than if you simply had to throw on an extra link inside your own site.
So how do you do it? Here are 2 popular techniques:
- Forums & Blogs One of the easiest ways to get great backlinks is to join a forum that is relevant to the content of your website. Or, follow a blog related to your industry, business or niche. You can find them by doing a simple search on Google. The key is to find forums and blogs that are active and popular, and that allow an anchor text in the member’s signature. For example if you have a dog walking service website and you join a dog forum that allows anchor text in the signature, you could use “dog walker” as your text and have it linked to your home page. This means that every time you start a thread or respond to a thread, your anchor text is published and it counts as a backlink. But be careful - admins aren't likely to accept your comment if it's obvious that you're just plugging in a link. Worst case scenario, you'll get flagged as a spammer. Be a good forum citizen or blog fan and offer comments that have value to the rest of the community.
- Article Marketing Another popular method of developing backlinks is to publish good content in any of the major free article directories. Directories like eHow.com, ArticlesBase, eZine, etc. carry all kinds of content from business to book reviews to arts and entertainment to how to build a rabbit hutch and everything in between. Publishers can take the articles that are posted and put them on their own site as content for free providing that they include the author’s “resource box” which includes links to their own site. Your articles, like everything else you do with your website, should be informative and engaging and of value to the reader. Your articles are the “give” part of this type of marketing, the “take” part comes in what’s called a resource box. At the end of your article you’ll have an opportunity to write a call to action to get traffic directly to your site. Resource boxes typically allow one anchor text and one URL address.
Good content is snatched up by publishers fairly quickly and you have an excellent opportunity to build backlinks. There are a ton of other things that you can do off page to build your site's credibility but these two methods are a great place to start. Just remember, build these links naturally - which means build them gradually and not all at once. Google loves natural link patterns and will reward your work with some great targeted traffic!
