Resources

Connections Vol. 2 Issue 10 October 2007

Weaving the Web for Increased Business

Organizations Link Multiple Web Sites to Stimulate Interest and Sales

By: Blaine R. Hilton

1-877-5-BLAINE

October, that wonderful month of transition. Summer is behind us and Fall is here. Along with the beginning of Fall comes the spooky Halloween holiday.

When you spend time on the World Wide Web, or simply the “Web,” it seems so very complex. Just by clicking around you can get from web site to web site. These web sites compose a collection of billions of web sites that are interconnected together by hyperlinks (or links).

If you break it down, the web can be thought of very simply, just like a spider web you may have in your back yard. The spider weaves a web by linking together many strands of super-strong silk. The more strands the spider weaves the stronger the web becomes.

This same analogy was used to explain search engines in the June edition of Connections. However in this month’s edition I’ll take a different approach and talk about how you can use this web of links to your advantage.

Comparing the spider web to your organization’s web site is a great analogy. Your web site alone, while still being accessible on the web, is but a mere island of information in a vast sea of openness. Your site needs to have strong strands linking your site to others.

Traditionally, these are the links most of us are familiar with; you start at site “A” and it has a block of text that is in blue and has an underline. You click on that link with your mouse and it takes, or links, you to site “B”. These are the links that interconnect web sites on the web. As the spider web grows stronger with additional strands, your web site presence will become greater with additional links pointing to your site.

Search engines such as Google and Microsoft Live drive the largest percentage of traffic to most sites. By far the search engine with the highest effect on your traffic is going to be Google. Google having over 70% of all searches is known for their patented search ranking system called Page Rank. Google Page Rank is a number between 0 and 10 that Google assigns to all web pages in their index.

Google’s system is based on link popularity, which is a ranking of both the quantity and the quality of the web sites that link to your own site. The theory behind this is the more people that link to you the better your site must be. A new web site would start with a rank of 0 and to build that up you must obtain incoming links. This is one of those things that can be easy to understand, but hard to implement.

At the most basic level, you simply need to go out and find other web sites that will agree to link to your web site.

Of course there are always details to work out, like giving the other site owner a good reason to link to your site, and actually making sure they link to it. Also as we have said before, quality is very important. Most search engines are aware of how some web sites try to beat the system by cheating. There are many schemes for link building that involve making link pages that list hundreds or thousands of links and spreading them on the web. These types of tactics, at best, don’t work any more, and can actually make your web site (and the domain name itself) black listed so it will not come up in search listings…ever.

As with writing content that is optimized first for users and then for the search engines, the same goes for link building. You want to look for link partners that are relevant to your site and that have the same type of audience as your own site. This way the content will be consistent with your target viewers. For instance if you have a site about industrial widgets, why would you want to solicit links from web sites that cater to home based gardening?

Q & A

How can I jump start my link building?

By: Blaine R. Hilton

1-877-5-BLAINE

One of the most effective ways of giving your site a jolt with link building and on-line marketing is to do something news worthy and issue a press release. Issuing a press release with a company such as PR Web can help get your site listed in the search engines.

A press release is even more powerful in this age of the Internet. If local newspapers decide to run with your story, that would be fantastic. Even if they don’t run the story, having the press release on the Internet means it is sent to places such as Yahoo News and Google News. This cannot only send additional traffic to your site, but can give your site credibility with the search engines.

New sites go through a sandbox period where the search engines will wait to include it to make sure that the site is legitimate. Being linked to from major sites, especially news sites, may help your site get out of this sandbox faster.