The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
March 2006, Volume 5, Issue 3

Developing Link Popularity: Like Peddling Milk Chocolate

by Heather Pidgeon, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

Remember selling candy bars to raise money for team uniforms, or for that special 8th grade trip to the local amusement park? In school on a Friday afternoon, the teacher would hand a box of candy bars to each student to bring home to sell to anyone willing to spend the dollar to support the cause. Inevitably, I would scrape up a dollar or two from my own piggy bank and then move to another sure win ? mom and dad ? before peddling the milk chocolate with krispies to other family members. Tackling the family first just made it that much easier to then go door to door to neighbors with a much lighter box of candy.

In that regard, the candy bar drive and link popularity development are similar. With both, the first place to begin is at home. Much like scouring the couch cushions for a dollar to buy a candy bar, reviewing your own site is a good first step to increasing your link popularity. Look for instances on your existing Web pages where you can reference, and link to, information on other pages of your site. After all, which site has content that’s more relevant to your site than your site?

Once you add internal links, it’s time to look to mom and dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles to buy some candy bars! Like looking to family to buy the candy, look to your parent company, sister companies or other partner companies to explore the possibility of gaining links from them. Gaining links from these types of companies not only aids in building your online presence, it can also help build the network of companies from a brand perspective. The best part of this is there’s something to gain for everyone involved!

When you are seeking to build your site’s credibility, it is best to focus on obtaining links from other established websites. It’s not a good idea to invest time and effort creating your own ancillary websites, or new domains, simply to attract links whose credibility you hope to pass on to your main site. Marketers sometimes try to do this by creating blogs, or non-branded educational sites, or new sites that focus on a particular niche about their business. But these new websites will have established no credibility with the search engines ? that takes time and their own link-building strategy ? and so will have no credibility to pass along to your main site or provide any link popularity value. Instead, invest your time crafting a value proposition to entice others to link to your main site.

Once you have built a solid linking foundation by improving link popularity and online credibility at home and within your extended family, it’ll be time to solicit your online “neighbors” for additional links to your website. But that’s a story for another time.

Click here to subscribe to the Search Marketing Advisor newsletter now.

Learn more about link popularity.

del.icio.us

Inquire About iProspect's Services

Access FREE White Papers and Webcasts

Subscribe to our FREE SEM Newsletter

View Upcoming Events and Webcasts

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: March 2006, Volume 5, Issue 3

Developing Link Popularity: Like Peddling Milk Chocolate

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
March 2006, Volume 5, Issue 3