Clients often wonder how “Link Building” works, why they need to have it, and how to get the most out of Link Building. There are a few basic guidelines that you need to follow to get positive results from Link Building campaigns and we’ll have a look at them in this post.

There are two main categories to consider when Link Building, On-page factors and Off-page factors.

On-page factors include the following:

The key here is volume of links and links that take advantage of targeted keywords.

Recently Google have placed a strong emphasis on frequency of content updates on a site as well as freshness of links.

When it comes down to the page rank for incoming links you have a number of choices. Typically, you’re able to get lots of links which have varying page rank at an affordable rate OR you’re able to get fewer links which have relatively better page rank at a higher cost.

Typically high pagerank links come via:

• privately negotiated paid links or;
• naturally occurring incentives for other high profile sites to link to you based on the value of your website or its information, or tools, or relevance to their audience or;
• paid links (text-link-ads or similar), or;
• link triangulation deals or reciprocation deals

It is very rare to be able to simply request a link to your site from a very high page rank 3rd party site or page – and get the link with nothing offered in return (who would have thought, there’s always a catch!).  We don’t engage in paid link strategies for clients, as if found out – Google may penalise you.

When you sit back and look at the way Link Building works, it does indeed make sense. Search engines such as google will review all the links coming into your site, along with the content on your site and give you a rank compared to other sites on the web. There are many factors that come into play to determine who should appear first, second, third etc but the main message still holds true…

Build targeted links to your site, do it on a regular basis, with content on your site which is keyword-rich and updated as often as possible. The more links, the better, and the more you can hone in on your keyword niche the better.

Happy Googling!

When formulating an online marketing Strategy, it’s important to consider the following points:

1.    How competitive your industry is online

Are you competing against other big brands, with huge budgets, or do you have an opportunity to really create a strong presence in the search engines, with little competition? A few years ago we found a client that sells synthetic turf had an enormous opportunity to rank well in the search engines.  There was little competition, and it was a strong growing industry.  They took advantage of that, are now leading their industry.  You can check how competitive your industry is by doing some keyword research using Googles Keyword Tool.

Google Keyword Tool

This gives you an idea of how many searches there are for the words you enter, and also how much competition there is.  You should also run some Google searches of course, and run your eyes down the listings to see what you’re up against.
2.    What keywords you would like your site to rank for?

Some words will be more popular of course, and will deliver the most traffic, however if your competition is too tough, you’re never likely to rank at the top of the engines.  In industries such as mortgage broking or car loans, you’re up against the big banks, who have fairly significant marketing budgets!! In these cases you can depend on long tail traffic – which is really any other traffic related to mortgage broking but not based on the really high ranking keywords.  Instead of mortgages melbourne, for example, you may end up ranking for “low cost mortgages” or “mortgage broker brunswick”, for example.

If you don’t have all that much heavy competition, then you can just go for the top ranking keywords – knock yourself out.
3.    The design/structure of the site you want to promote online

It’s important to ensure that your site is capable of converting visitors to enquiries or customers – no point sending customers to a poorly designed website!  We often have new customers asking us to optimise a terribly designed site.  We do ourselves out of a job, but will recommend they go back to their designers and get a new site built first… or we try and sell them a new site of course!  Have a read of example 3 on the Online Strategy page of our website for a good example of how this worked for Album Works.

Album Printer new design

4.    Your strategy & budget

There are a multitude of services available; how much you would like to spend will ultimately allow you to choose the most suitable strategy for your online marketing.  Choose what mediums you like (SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc), then get some professional advice on what’s required.