Persuading other web sites to link to your own could be one of the cleverest pieces of marketing you do - it's low cost, highly effective at driving traffic and it can have a dramatic effect on your search engine ranking. Links are one of the most popular ways for people to find new sites and so the more quality sites that link to you the better.
But is persuading other sites to link to yours a difficult task?
Not according to Ken McGaffin author of a new report, Linking Matters, "If a linking strategy is carefully planned and implemented, it can be very worthwhile. Amazon started their linking strategy back in 1995 and now has nearly 30 million links to their site - this brings in substantial new business. Links are what make the web work and any site large or small can benefit from more links."
The core of the web is made up of sites that are interlinked with both inbound and outbound links. These sites have a high link popularity - as a result they attract major traffic," says McGaffin, "An effective linking strategy can boost your link popularity, make you part of the all-important core and bring in new customers. Too many sites ignore linking and find themselves out in the wilderness, isolated and rarely visited."
Link Popularity started with Google
Link popularity became important when Google started to use it as an objective measure of the quality of a site: if someone linked to your site, you must have good content, so you got a point: if you linked to someone else's site, they must have good content, so they got a point. Now almost all search engines use some sort of link popularity measure. As a result, dubious practices such as link farms and 'you link to me, I'll link to you' schemes sprang up to artificially boost link popularity.
These are a waste of time says McGaffin, "Such links never attract traffic and are penalised by the search engines - you should have nothing to do with them. What counts are quality links: links from five quality, relevant sites are infinitely superior to a thousand link farms.
So what do you need to persuade other sites to link?
"You must have quality content - something that will be of real value to your target sites. That might be a product or service, useful tips, a review or article. You need to think about the target site and their site users and you need to think how your own business will benefit. Building a linking strategy requires a lot of thought and effort - Linking Matters provides a logical step-by-step process to help site-owners plan a linking strategy - and its free!" says McGaffin.
Does linking work? Linking Matters will prove it
The Linking Matters site is being promoted with a linking strategy and the results of how the strategy is doing will be published on the site every Monday morning. McGaffin's maxim is "create great content, link to great content and great content will link to you" is about to be put to the test.
ENDS
(i) For further information email kenmcgaffin at linkingmatters.com or phone 00 44 (0)1292 440158
(ii) If you want to link to Linking Matters, feel free to write your own code or download code and images from our links page.
