Earning Links
A search marketer must create a website that earns links from external sources. Links are the Internet equivalent of positive word of mouth about your business. For instance, if a blog about personal finance links to the personal finance site Quicken. com, that link from the blog is saying that Quicken has quality content that the blogger considers trustworthy and relevant; it’ s the Internet equivalent of a referral in the physical world. Pages with more links pointing to them generally get better search results than pages with fewer links.
Links that point to a web page are considered to be votes for that page. Search engines take into account the volume and, more important, the quality of the links to a page to determine which pages to serve in their results for a particular keyword search query.
In the following sections, we discuss how to earn links by using search marketing tactics that stay within the search engine’ s terms of service and avoid black-hat tactics, as stated in the“ Black hats and white hats” sidebar, earlier in this chapter.
Step 1: Cross-link your own content
The method of building links that’ s most under your control is cross-linking on your own site. If a financial planning website publishes a blog post titled“ Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Planning for Retirement,” it would make sense, for both the reader and the search engine, to find a cross-link from this blog post to a page explaining the company’ s retirement-planning services.
Linking within your own website improves user experience and sends signals to search engines about what pages are important on your website. Cross-link to important pages on your website wherever and whenever it makes sense to do so, while keeping user experience in mind.
Step 2: Study your competitors’ links
The next step is doing some competitive research. Using a tool such as Open Site Explorer( https:// moz. com / researchtools / ose /), you can research your major competitors to see what sites are linking to them. Then reach out to those sites to see whether they’ re interested in linking to your site as well.
Step 3: Create generous content
You can earn links by creating so-called generous content: content that mentions other people, especially influential people who could link back to you or share your content on their social networks. One way to create generous content is to write an article about a specific person or brand and then link to the appropriate site. This article may take the form of a biography or an interview.
Another way to build generous content is to create a crowdsourced post that asks experts to write 100 words or so on the same topic and then links to each expert’ s site. We cover