One Good link
One Good link
One good link per week. If you want to be serious about increasing the traffic to your website and the value you receive from your internet marketing, you will want to make this part of your business goals every week.
Linking is an integral part of the way the Internet works, second in importance only to having your bidders bookmark your website and navigate directly to it. It is impossible for anyone to know about every website that is online, but being linked from another site in a good neighborhood is the best way for new visitors and search engines spiders to initially find your site.
How do you get one good link every week?
Buying Links
There are many local websites and directories that want you to advertise with them. While they may tell you how much traffic they get, and may be able to tell you how many times your ad or link is clicked on, sometimes the greatest value is simply having the link there because they are in a good neighborhood. Your small town newspaper website is probably your greatest local example. While you may question the immediate effectiveness of that ad placement, it can be the intangibles that you may benefit from the most in the long run.
When Google’s algorithm decides where to rank your site when someone searches for you, a significant amount of the score they allocate to your site is based on how many incoming links you have and more importantly where they are from. Even if you never get someone to click that link, surprisingly it can still be worth the time and cost to get that link.
On Global Auction guide all our auctioneers get a link back to their own website, and several web savvy auctioneers have told me over the years they would pay our annual membership fee just for the link they get, and the exposure they get to their sales is a bonus.
But beware of websites or phone marketers that tell you they can get your website listed on 200 - 500 - 10,000 web directories or search engines for only 99$. Like everything that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. These sites are known a “link farms” and being listed on them can actually penalize your ranking on Google.
Swapping Links
Every Auctioneer considers their website to be in a good neighborhood. Why not swap links with other auctioneers? You may not want to link to your competitor in the same town or area, but at the next convention be sure to swap your business cards with like minded auctioneers from the other side of the state so you can exchange links on your sites.
If you participate on the Auctioneer forums at The NAA site or AuctionZip.com , that is a great place to find auctioneers across the country who want to swap links.
Free Links
There are ways to get good free links, but you have to be selective about where you want your name mentioned. The easiest way is once again on the Auctioneer Forums mentioned above. Be sure to have your website address linked properly in your signature files when you make a post. Because they are partially password protected, be sure to comment once in a while on the public portions so that the Google Spider is able to see your link. Find other collector websites you are interested in and become part of those communities so that your links are able to be posted.
Auctioneers directories are another good link to get. Most of the auction sale aggregators have them, but there are a couple such as www.luv2bid.com and www.auctionguide.com that have been around for a long time and through their content is dated, it can help your site do better with a link from them.Your Local Chamber of Commerce is another great website to get a link from.
What is a Clean Link?
Many times when you have a link or an ad placed on a website, when someone clicks on it the browser actually has to check with the original website first to find the proper link to redirect the visitor to. Your website link is not actually on the page with your ad, but rather it is redirected to your site. This is done for several reasons as the site is able to track how many times your ad is seen and also clicked on.
This is important if you are paying for an ad per number of impressions or how many times it is seen. This will especially happen if the site is rotating several ads in that spot as every time someone sees the page a different ad is seen.
These type of links do not help your site improve your SEO or Search Engine Optimization. As an advertiser you want your ad link directly to your site with no redirect scripts if you want to gain the most value from your ad.
If you want to take it a step further, you can also request that instead of the link showing Joe’s Auctions linking to Joe’s website, you can ask that the link read Joe’s Fundraising Auctions in Minneapolis and link to his website. This will help his website rank better for those terms.
Using specific anchor link text still helps to rank better in Google but is not as effective as it was 2 years ago. This was the same method of link bombing when done on a massive scale put George W. bush at the top of the search results when somebody searched Google for “miserable failure”.
If you are interested you can also use Google’s Advanced search or Yahoo Site Explorer to see which sites are linking to you, and then see who is linking to your competitor down the street.
As you start to get links, don’t expect an immediate overnight increase in your ranking. Seeing improvements is a long process, and if you get too many inbound links too fast it can raise red flags for Google.
If at the end of the year you can look back and be satisfied that you got 52 quality links to your website you can be happy that you have accomplished more than most other auctioneers have done and perhaps made some good business connections along the way.
We’ll talk about Social Media, Blogging, and Twitter in the next column. Don’t know what Twitter is and if it can help you? Stay Tuned.
Dwayne Leslie is the founder and President of the Global Auction Media Group at www.globalauctionguide.com
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