DIGITAL MARKETING – “Show me who you run with and I’ll show you what you’re like.”
Some real life relationships matter more than others, a tough pill to swallow some times. The same is true for being found online.
One of the best descriptions I’ve heard about increasing search engine rankings is that ‘the internet is like one big high school popularity contest.’
You want to have a lot of friends, but some friends matter more. But in this instance we’re not talking about literal friends, but links connecting your website to others around the internet – backlinks — to be specific.
Backlinks are a critical component of your offsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. You can use a listings manager or service to manually or automatically build citations, but Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t weight all backlinks the same.
While citations are a critical component of any SEO strategy — they are 100 per cent necessary – when your business is in a competitive space (like plumbing, HVAC, law, retail, etc.) you’re going to need more than just the bare minimum effort to get a website into the coveted first page of Google.
To put the importance of your search engine rankings in perspective, think about this:
The organic links on the first page of Google receive 90 per cent of all internet traffic related to someone’s search. On that first page the top three organic links receive 61 per cent of all clicks related to that search.
Who you run with, or the quality of those backlinks, really does matter.
To develop your own quality backlinks you have two options.
You can focus on organic link development.
Create fantastic, engaging content on your website for others to share and consume. Invest in a listings or citations manager or service. Work on your public relations and get featured and linked to on other websites.
Alternatively you can take the Algorithmic Approach and quickly plug directly into an existing network of high quality websites that are well respected by Google’s crawlers (or indexing robots).
Algorithmic SEO combines the development of onsite content with a link exchange plugin, instantly connecting a business’s website to thousands of other industry and topically related sites.
This strategy automatically generates, audits and maintains a high quality link profile that is relevant to a specific business.
It’s complemented by the creation of relevant content with targeted keywords that are added to a website’s pages to better optimize search results.
As businesses look to grow, either by adding new locations or expanding their product and service offerings, standing out online is critical.
Make sure that no matter what your business does, you’re easy to find.
John MacDonald is the Director of Business Development with the Business Examiner News Group. Connect with him directly at john@businessexaminer.ca, by calling 866.758.2684 ext. 130. or online at: www.bedigitalmarketing.ca
