This second Thursday post about how to encourage visitors to your site us about using back-links. The full list of approaches to increasing traffic is in the earlier post “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site” and last time I discussed direct entry.
Back-links can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your site and they are effective locally as well as globally. So, what is a back-link?
A link on your site, can take your visitor to another page on your site or to a page on another site. When you link to another site, the site owners can find out about it and to them it is a back-link. So, back-links are links from other people’s sites to yours.
They are useful for two reasons:
- You will get visitors directly through back-links. They visit the other site and follow the link to yours.
- Search engines follow back-links and so the more you have, the more likely you are to be found by search engines. (I’ll write about search engines in another post in this series).
Things to Consider When Seeking Back-Links
- They are best if they come from relevant sites. Some people look for any opportunity for a back-link but if they drive visitors to your site who are not interested in your offer, they have no value. Some people spam websites and blogs by trying to get comments onto them to increase their back-links. This is something to watch out for if you have a blog but don’t do it; it has no value whatsoever to your business, as well as being a nuisance.
- A good back-link would be from a site that shares your market but not your product. So, if you are a baker, you might have links from other local traders.
- The anchor text is important. This is the text highlighted and linked to your site. Search engines read this text and if it says something like “Fred’s Bakery for Excellent Bread” (where Fred is your business name) then this will increase the value of the link. It also encourages visitors to follow the link. Sometimes you may be able to suggest the anchor text to the linking site.
- Reciprocal links are a vexed question. This is where they link to you and you link to them. On the one hand, this could increase visitors to both sites. Where you have the same market, eg two shops in the same row of shops, it might make sense. However, it seems search engines ignore reciprocal links. If you’re not dependent on search engines (eg if your trade is mostly local) then reciprocal links may not be a problem.
Quality of Copy
One final point. If your site has good copy, other sites will link to it for that reason. So, blogs might review your site or your business. Or some sites may link simply because they think your copy is a good read. How have you encouraged other sites to carry links to your site?
If you have good copy regularly updated, you may find email lists helpful. And these will be the topic of my next post.
How have you built back-links to your site? Use comments to share your tips for good practice.
