A website is a necessary marketing tool for businesses today. If you want your website to be an active sales and marketing tool for you, you will need a strategy to get your web site in front of your target market. Implementing an effective linking strategy will take your website a long way in becoming an effective sales tool. Discover some linking strategies that have great results implemented properly.
Commenting On Other Blogger’s Blogs
Commenting on other blogs is a great way to get links back to your site. Most blogs will allow you to put anchor text for the link back to your blog as well. In order to get the best benefit from this method, you will need to find a blog that will send back link juice to your web site (a blog that doesn’t use a nofollow tag in the link). You can search the Internet for blogs that dofollow to find them. Search for and comment on blogs that are in the same niche that your web site is in, and you will also be strengthening your branding as well.
In order to get your comments published on the blog, you need to provide some value in your comments. The easiest way to do that is to give your opinion on the post, or add another perspective. Comments like “nice post” don’t add anything and will usually just get deleted, thus wasting your time.
Posting In Forums
Posting in forums is another way to get great links back to your web site. Many forums allow you to create a signature file as part of your account info. This signature file is added to the end of your posts, and will usually allow you to put a link or 2 in the signature. You don’t want to put more than 2-3 links in your signature file because many forums will think you are link spamming and may either disable your account.
As with commenting on other people’s blogs, you will want to add value to the forum with your posts. You can add value by asking a question, or answering a question. To get the most value out of your signature file, use your best keyword phrase in the anchor text to link back to your website.
Join Related Communities on Ning
Ning is a huge community where you can actually create your own social network. There are over 1 million social networks on Ning, so you will find something in your targeted area. When you join a Ning community, you get your own page where you can place a link back to your own web site. Links that are from sites that are related to yours in content are much more valuable than links from generic sites. The more communities you join, the more links you can point back to your own web site. You can also create links with keywords in the anchor text which will help you with your search engine rankings for those keywords.
When you are creating a linking strategy, start with the easy ways to get links pointing back to your website. When linking, use techniques that will help you in your Search Engine Optimization as well, to send targeted traffic to your website. There are other linking strategies that create targeted traffic to your web site that should be incorporated as an overall marketing campaign.