I took in all the expert advice from the interviews over at Sugarrae.com to get the answer to the age old question: What is linkbuilding? How can it work for you? Linkbuilding Strategies That Work Continued-
URL’s get longer and longer everyday so people like to use shortening services like TinyURL or Bitly. There was some debate amongst the experts as to if Google gives rank building credit to shortened urls. Most agree, yes, the shortened URL’s don’t function any differently in Google then do the long original ones as long as they are 301’ed (redirected) and the end destination page is indexed. There is an increased exposure benefit however with the shorten urls’s since people tend to pick up and repost these links.
How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?
If you use a shortener when posting your links via social media sites use a service like Bitly which is search engine friendly since it uses a 301 redirect recommended by Google, Bing and Yahoo! As far as strategy goes, this one isn’t something to obsess over but to keep an eye on how these type of links effect your ranking long term since Google is constantly updating its algorithms. Also, there are services that allow you to build your own shortener/personal url for links some of which allow you to add keywords to the link and this goes back to helping with branding as well. I like Media Bistro’s quick and easy steps for getting your personal url or if you’re already running on WordPress, they have a few plugins available, I recommend YOURLS.
5. Linkbuilding for Small Buisness
You’re busy running your business, maybe you’re brick and mortar or use your website to fufill orders for an existing customer base and haven’t thought about online marketing strategy too much. Unfortunately, if that is the case you are way behind your competition. Never fear there are ways to get back on track starting today. Internet marketing is generally a winner take most market, so the harder you work initially to gain momentum, the less you will have to work once its built. If you have an hour a day to devote to linkbuilding you can accomplish more faster; an hour a week? Well, its going to take you a lot longer to see a big difference in rank and customers. Regardless of time constraints here’s what you should focus on:
How Can You Stay On Top Of This Strategy?
- Spend time initially researching and writing quality , sharable content for a blog on your website, if you don’t have the time to do it, pay a freelance writer to do it for you. It will be a wise investment in the long run.
- This goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway so you can see the whole strategy picture-After you have some shareable content, start creating your social profile on the obvious sites- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, so you can push out content there and build networks. Ping.fm is a good all-in-one place to build out your networks, as it pushes out content to all networks at once, saving you precious time.
- Start a PPC program, since you only have an hour a week, it will take awhile to build rank organically so you want to have other routes helping you along, this will get you better rankings quicker.
- Have a “working lunch” spend that hour that you would normally use to eat, eating and working on your content for the blog! This way you get in an extra hour a week on marketing strategy.
6. What To Avoid In Your Linkbuilding Strategy
There are shortcuts in linkbuilding, but as with any shortcut, its good to be aware of when they can help you and how they may hurt you in the long run. The old adage is true: Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is.
- Too much reciprocal linking- swapping links with a few trusted, authoritative sites is good for business. Trading links with sites that have no content and no value is bad for your overall strategy.
- Press-releases that don’t have any value. Do you really have something to share about your business? Have you gone public? Launched a new web tool? Fired 5,000 people? Probably all newsworthy topics. But if you haven’t made any big news happen recently, you should probably avoid writing the press release about how amazing your office Christmas party was.
- Buying links- this will get you focusing in the wrong direction. Don’t get me wrong, it works for the short-term, but you need to be thinking of long term strategy and putting your efforts there. As one of our experts Roger Montti puts it: “Short-cuts work for the short term.”
- Scrimping on the copywriting. Bad idea. If you can’t write or don’t want to write pay someone to create content for you. Pay them well, this is a long-term strategy that you want to get right.
I hope these tips have helped you get up and running with your online marketing strategy. Check out some of my in content links above for more in-depth processes for each concept. Of course if you have any questions feel free to contact me directly at danielle@searchtrafficpro.com
Thanks to Sugarrae for her interviews and all the experts that took time to answer these questions. You can check out her original post here.