Securing linking partners

As competition continues to intensify, Web site owners are searching for more ways to catch up or surpass their competitors. They have found that links to their Web sites from higher-ranking or more popular sites adds to their site's credibility and popularity, whether through a blog page, RSS feed page, or a page of content at the site. Being included in a business's Web site page as an authority or as someone of importance is valuable because this fortifies the position for the business or organization brand being referred to.

The difficulty has been in the effort it takes to find and approach likely Web sites that could benefit another non-competing site and vice versa; it needs to be beneficial to both parties or there is no reason to link to the other site. Embarking on a link-building campaign can absorb hours and days of time and effort, and once the contact is made or an email address discovered, it takes additional time to ask for a link to an outside site, especially if the other business is unfamiliar with the company who is asking for the link.

The effort is further exasperated when the recipients do not respond favorably initially and must be contacted again and perhaps multiple times, before they are considered not interested or non-responsive, and then removed from the list of prospective link partners. Many Web site owners have decided to use the services of outside sources that have refined tools for link building work.

Inbound links and reciprocal links

Today's SEO techniques are highly sophisticated, saving time and tedious procedures. Now it is possible to scan the Internet for sites linking to your competitors, for example, so that you may also approach the same (or similar) sites and request links to your site, or exchange links from each others' sites, for the purpose of enhancing the optimization and ranking of your Web site. A search can also be made using keywords, whereby the software can retrieve Web sites based upon selected search engine results pages.

The technology enables sites to be sorted by page rank and traffic rank to help determine which sites might be more advantageous to partner with. The software will list information to help users evaluate the sites for description as well as traffic volume and popularity of the sites, and help assess the relevance of potential partner sites to link with.

Once the sites have been determined, they can be approached individually in a personal email campaign, for example, or automatically in a bulk email correspondence requesting links back to your Web site. Email templates can be created similar to a mail-merge program, and systematically and automatically distributed to the Web sites' email addresses that the software finds. Follow-up messages can also be used for the first, second, and third steps of an automatic correspondence cycle, with selective time periods to elapse between each.

Web sites that do not reply to the final message can be removed from the campaign automatically. Web sites that respond positively can be grouped into a partner group and the site removed from the campaign, preventing further emails. Link partners can then be managed and the quality of the links can be monitored.

Keeping the other sites honest

The sites chosen can also be checked for agent cloaking (where the Web crawlers are guided to search engine optimized pages while human visitors are presented with actual pages). You will be satisfied to know that any sites that prevent search engines from crawling the pages that contain links to your site can be removed from the list of partners who have agreed to link to your site; some designers place this code into the pages by default, so it doesn't necessarily mean that the Web site owner is dishonest, but may not know of the cloaking agent, and can thereby benefit from being alerted of the cloaking code.

Link building is essential

To continue to advance a site's position links to a site must be continually secured. The more good quality links, the better. With the advanced systems now available and the analytics to examine the results of the efforts, more businesses can reap the rewards for expanding their sphere of influence.

Building back links to your Web site may prove to be the missing element to your Web site's popularity, and consistently higher page ranking.  

For more back link information and prices for link building campaigns contact the J Howard Company and put advanced technology to work for you.