Achieving Local Front Page SEO Results – Links
Throughout a series of blog posts I’ll talk about achieving front page SEO results for both local and national listings. Essentially your site’s relevance and popularity both locally and on a national level will determine its rank in the search engines.
Keep in mind that there are millions of websites online and probably thousands that sell or offer the same products and services that yours does. Plus, there are probably (though hopefully not) a hundred or so in your local area that do just that. Also, there are a number of websites that offer links to sites that sell the product(s) or service(s) yours does.
So how do you get to the top of the search listings?
There are a hundred or so factors that, when all added up, determine the listings that the search engines display when you click to search for a product or service. Today I’ll talk about links.
Step 1
Links within your site (internal links) will help search engines find your content on your site’s pages. A navigation bar usually fulfills the need to link to every page on your site whether it’s the top navigation or additional footer navigation that points to copyright info and/or terms and conditions. Ideally every page on your site should in some way be able to be found through or visited from any other page of your site. Drop down menus and search fields usually do just fine so create your site’s navigation with that in mind.
Step 2
Links from other sites are important because they count as a ‘vote’ for your site and carry more weight and have a higher quality if they come from a resource that is relative to your site’s product or service. Getting as many quality links to your site is important to your SEO results.
Writing a blog post and linking to your site and a specific product gives you a quality link if that blog post is related to the product or service you’re featuring. Having an industry leader(s) write an independent blog post about your product or service and linking to it is another high quality link building strategy.
Adding your site to micro site’s like Squidoo or shopping sites like HotFrog or Kaboodle give you a chance to write a bit more about your product/service and display them on another store front type site. Using Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook or other micro blogging/social media sites and providing links to your site via status updates does well to improve your high quality link building efforts.
Asking vendors to partner with your site by trading links is a great way to build quality links if your vendors can benefit from your links or you can benefit from theirs.
There are many ways to build high quality links to your site, but just don’t EVER buy links or opt-in to link farms and for that matter, signing up for a bunch of link directories isn’t recommended either. Those are big SEO no-nos and can get your site banned from search engine listings if you participate in many of the ‘get links quick’ schemes.
Cheers!