Effective Backlink Strategies

There is no denying that budgets are currently very tight in marketing. In order for money to stretch further, and marketing resources to be used fully, many organisations are developing and implementing backlink strategies. Essentially, a backlink is a link from other sites to yours. In SEO terms, the search engines love them. They are used as a way of verifying the usefulness of your site and therefore help search engines decide where your site should rank in the search engine results. The more quality backlinks you have, the better your page ranking. As research proves that the closer you are to the top of the search, the more likely it is that you will get the visit, you can see how important an effective backlink strategy is.

1. Get listed on the search engines – It sounds a fairly simple thing but some people forget to do it. As about 80% of traffic to websites comes via search engines it is critical that your website is listed on the three main search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo.

2. Check your webtrends – Do you know where your traffic is coming from? Through good web traffic analysing programmes such as Webtrends, Google Analytics or Alexa you can see what links are the main traffic drivers to your site. Do ensure that these links continue to be live links. These other sites may change their content, or accidently change a URL while updating pages. Keep on top of this.

3. Actively seek quality links – Effective backlinks are quality backlinks. Try searching the keywords you associate with your brand – for example, “technology marketing, B2B marketing, B2B design” and see what comes up. If you can seek out a link with the sites that appear then do so.

4. Use forums, guest books and blog comments – An easy and low level way to get your link quietly out into the ether is to make comments on other peoples websites and leaving your url in the post. Where possible, keep your link contextual and keyword based. For example, “Great post. Very good to hear a different point of view on B2B marketing (Imbed link to www.matizmo.co.uk )

5. Write Articles or Guest Blog Posts – Not only does this strategy help position you as a leader in your field on a personal level, it also gets your URL out there into the world being read by other audiences, and crawled by the search engine bots.

6. Allow your web content to be shared – By having an “Add This” or “Share this” button on your site you can ensure that your content, including videos can be shared and a backlink is placed on whatever site it appears on. For video sharing via YouTube, a good idea is to post your URL in the description box, forcing a backlink from whichever site that shares it. It goes without saying that blogs are a great Trojan horse for backlinks, use them well.

7. RSS feeds – Allow site visitors to subscribe to your site. This gives backlinks too and frankly is a great content marketing tool too.

While not exhaustive, the above list of backlink strategies provides a great starting point for B2B marketers just embarking on optimising their site. For a full backlink analysis and strategy, contact Matizmo.