To Make the Most of Link Building for Your Small Business, Think Digitally

If you're not in the SEO business, you may not have heard of link building. But if you use the Internet to find businesses, you've probably seen the effects of link building in the search-engine results you see first. It's an important tactic for increasing your website's rankings in search results and bringing more traffic to your website.

There's not a great deal of understanding about what link building is and what it can do outside of the SEO world. Some small business owners have been billed by their SEO providers for link building time and questioned the hours that went into it. Link building is something of a needle-in-a-haystack pursuit, but when that needle is found, it can be made of solid gold.

As a business owner, raising your awareness of link building is more than worth your while. The more you know about it, the more you can apply and capitalize on your knowledge as you go about your daily business.

A brief definition.

Link building is used to help websites rank as high as possible in search engine results. Because recent statistics show that the first-place listing in Google's organic search results gets a whopping third of all traffic, it's easy to see why link building is so important.

The goal of link building is to increase the "authority" of a site. This authority is recognized by a search engine, which displays websites with higher authority ahead of other sites. Part of the formulae for evaluating a site's authority are the links on other sites that lead back to the original site. When links come from websites that Google, for instance, deems high on trustworthiness and low on spam, there's a halo effect for the site receiving the link. Simply put, qualifying for (or earning) a link from highly trusted websites makes your site look trustworthy to search engines, and your search-engine rankings increase.

To help all of this magic happen, SEO providers smartly invest a good portion of their clients' budgets in link building.

Not all links are created equal.

So we see how important link building is, but merely grabbing any link you can is not only fairly useless, it can actually do damage. Some aspects of basic SEO are do-it-yourself, but for most business owners, comprehensive link building really isn't one of them. The reason is simply the adverse of the above explanation: links from untrustworthy sites reflect badly on your site, lowering its authority and making it suspect in the eyes of Google's algorithms.

The future of link building.

At present, link building is near the top of the list of strategies for elevating a website's ranking and driving traffic. I don't see this changing anytime soon; in fact, I'm finding it becoming an exciting challenge as an SEO. The significant changes to the way search engines react to links have helped sort out the good from the bad among SEO practitioners, because great, original content gets rewarded and lazy SEOs aren't likely to go to the trouble to create it. Solid, natural marketing principles rule, from creating that relevant content to just being likeable. It can't be faked, and that's making the good SEO shops even better.

This next point is critical to remember, because no matter how much or how fast algorithms change, one thing never will: Creating content that's relevant to your company and to your customers will always be the right thing to do. People reading your content know when all of your content just doesn't add up. Now more than ever, search engines do, too.

Advice for business owners.

Whether you attempt DIY link building or have contracted for link building services, there's a lot you can do to support the overall strategy:

• First, look for the easy opportunities. Creating a Twitter account for your business? Link it back to your site. Do you donate every year to your favorite national charity? Get a link from it back to your site. Do you sponsor something? Get a link!
• Ask your customers. If you're an e-commerce merchant, identify your best, most loyal customers. Think of them as your brand ambassadors and ask them to link to their favorite products shown on your site.
• Go for interesting content. Stay open to ideas for new content to put out there. Is there some really useful information you have to share? Did something interesting/humorous happen at your company? Content that people pass along can lead to the creation of links back to your site.
• Be (or hire) a blogger. For most businesses, it doesn't usually make sense to change the main content on your site with great frequency. A blog, however, is the perfect place to add fresh content to your site. It opens up a channel for you to take part in conversations and earn links from other trusted bloggers.

So in the course of the day, it comes down to thinking digitally. Anytime it makes sense to get a link back to your site, go after it. When you do, you'll see potential linking opportunities that your competitors will wish they'd found first.