Smart link building

One of the most commonly used search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to get extra traffic to a site, editorial or ecommerce, is link building. This consists of encouraging and creating links from other sites, to your various pages.

There are a few reasons why this increases your traffic, on a very basic level is creates more paths for people to follow and reach your site. But the other reason is that it gives validation to your site, which search engines love. A link from another worthy site acts as a vote of confidence in you and therefore boosts your standing with Google and other search engines.

“Inbound links are an essential part of that process because Google uses them as a means of estimating your online reputation,” says Phil Rothwell, marketing director at ecommerce software supplier SellerDeck.

“Basically speaking, the more inbound links your site has, the more importance Google ascribes to its content. They originally nicked the idea from the world of academia, where academic papers tend to be more highly regarded if they are commonly referenced by others.”

This has been one of Google’s main determining factors when ranking sites in search results since the very beginning. But for the first few years, as you may know, it encouraged some rogue linking techniques such as link farming and paid-for links to sites with poor content purely set up to post links.

Google hates anyone trying to beat the system and artificially influence ranking and so the penalties for this kind of link building have been think and fast. Most recently in April 2012, the Penguin update shook up search results, wiping the link value from many sites with questionable link profiles.

“The first thing to state is that it is not a game of numbers – anyone who has read anything about the machinations of Google will know that Google can actually penalise websites who actively chase after bad quality or irrelevant links – a trend that has increased in the wake of the search engines much publicised “Penguin” update,” says Martin Dinham, Director at Channel Digital.

“The key thing that Google is looking for is links from sites that are themselves well regarded by the search engine – effectively references for your site. Acquiring these is therefore primarily about demonstrating that your site is a valuable resource and one that people will actively WANT to link out to.”

This means that creating a valuable link portfolio is no easy task. It is extremely time consuming and takes some creative thinking on your behalf but you will reap the rewards if you succeed.

So how should you go about creating these valuable links?

For a start you need to decide which pages you want to create links to. The obvious choice would be your homepage but Google doesn’t like it if all of your links lead straight to your homepage. You should mix it up, using a spread of homepage, category pages and specific product pages.

In addition to this you should mix up the anchor text used in your links – don’t make them all look the same. Convey different messages and give a spread of insights using various keywords.

Create great sharable content

This is harder for ecommerce sites as most of your pages tend to be simply product pages but supporting editorial content can really help to create link worthy options. Having “How To” tutorials with your products can help you to stand out from your competitors and give people in your industry and reason to link to you.

“Producing assets such as product reviews, demonstration videos, comprehensive technical specifications and the like is going to help in terms of making your site stand out from the pack and therefore naturally attract links,” says Dinham.

“Other types of media can help – as mentioned videos can be powerful, but also infographics that summarise complex data in an easily digestible form can incentivise websites to link to them and “widgets” that other webmasters can embed in their site can have the same affect.”

Stay clear of quick fixes

Any tactic that will garner you hundreds of links in a short space of time is best to be avoided.

You should also stay away from sites which don’t moderate their comments. Sites with no manual review process don’t have great value with Google as they can get blocked up with low quality spam.

Target industry relevant, quality sites

The more trustworthy the site you are being linked to the better so try and foster relationships with trusted sites related to your niche. When commenting and leaving links, make sure they are relevant and you are offering some form of useful insight.

As well as leaving insightful comments, you might also want to write guest blogs for these sites and request a link back. Look at all of the content driven sites in your industry and approach them to see if they are open to publishing guest content. As long as what you are offering if of high quality, you should be able to get some good valuable linking.

Utilise social media

Shared links on social media are as important as links on editorial sites and search engine value these as they are genuine human interactions with your brand. Encourage people to use the social media buttons on your target pages.

Keep an eye on your link profile

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to look at your inbound and internal links. You can see the people who are linking to you the most and if they are good quality links – make sure you look after the relationship you have with these link builders.

The overall message to ecommerce sites looking to increase their links is QUALITY QUALITY QUALITY. Both in the content and commentary that you offer out, and in the sites that you look to get links back from. In the long-term, your ranking with thank you for it and your sales will benefit.