Promoting your e-commerce website
Tips for creating linking strategies which work.
A large part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is creating inbound links to a website which increase the perceived importance of that website.
Search engine algorithms use inbound links (from external websites into yours) as a vote on popularity, and to a certain respect a vote of trust, so it makes sense to think that the more links you have the better. Like most things in life, things aren't quite this simple...
'Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others'
This modified quote from George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' displays the inequality of the web. You would think that a link is a link, no matter where it comes from, but because of various factors (including ageing factors, the importance of educational establishments and market leading businesses... not to mention the dubious activities of spammers over the years) some links are not only less important, they can seriously harm your website!
Generally, the incoming links that you really want for your e-commerce website come from the following websites:
- Government websites, including local government (virtually impossible to get)
- Educational websites, including school, college and University
- Top commerce websites related to your business area
- Relevant blogs and forums which deal with the same subject matter to your own website
- Focussed Online directories which don't allow spam
- Social bookmarking and social media websites
- A very select few human edited directories
- Even fewer paid directories
Out of these websites to target, the most relevant nowadays are the social networking and social media websites such as Facebook, Digg, Technorati, YouTube and Sphinn, along with micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter and content related blogs and forums, but good results can still be obtained by adding your website to free (not paid) directories.
The inexorable rise of the relevance of social networking and media websites to every day life means that the power of these websites is now allowing a much greater importance of link relevance, and although most of these websites use 'nofollow' tags on links to prevent passing relevance of content through that link, a link from a heavily trafficked page which, for instance, has an embedded video will count heavily to the perceived importance of the 'linked to' page.
Of course, to get the best from your website linking strategy, you will probably want to take on board the services of an established SEO company. In this respect, Intelligent Retail have a dedicated team of SEO consultants who can not only advise on best practise methods, but do all of the hard work for you.
Paid links and why to avoid them
There was a time when you could pay someone to display a link from their very established and trusted website to yours. A couple of years ago, this was a good way of getting not only targetted, relevant traffic, it also pushed up the relevance and trust of the 'linked to' website as it passed some of the importance of the website selling the links to the 'linked to' website. This practise has now all but been quashed because the biggest search engine company, Google, has put changes in it's algorithms that penalise paid links, and also introduced reporting mechanisms which allow anyone to report a paid link.
Because of the changes made by Google, it is now an extremely bad idea to use paid links from any website, apart from a very select few. The only absolutely safe paid links available now are from the Yahoo directory and 'best of the web' (probably the oldest directory in existance).
Blogs and Forums
Weblogs (blogs, basically online interactive journals) and forums offer good linking opportunities if you know how to manipulate them. The use of blogs to gain links is one which needs a lot of finesse and even more time and care. It's no good targetting a blog about homeware if you're promoting an online car parts business... the two are just not compatible! Look for blogs which perfectly compliment your own products and write interesting, relevant replies to the posts you find. Above all... don't try to spam as you will get banned from that blog!
With blogs, most of the time you don't need to register to reply to a blog post and so can just reply, adding a web address and an email address.
Forums need even more finesse, research and above all time, as you will have to build up a reputation with most forums before you are allowed to contribute (and more importantly) link your forum posts to your own website. Build up a rapport with your fellow forum contributors before including links out from your posts!
To set up for a forum, you will not only have to join the forum (by filling in a form), but you will also have to create a profile (including information about you or your company and links to your website and all the other information required such as a photo or avatar (forum picture) to build trust from fellow forum users. You must of course first check that the forum passes relevance and that the content you are writing can actually get found by the search engines in the first place, or all of this work is wasted!
The bottom line...
Find a good SEO company for your e-commerce website who know how to create focussed relevant linking strategies, such as the team at Intelligent Retail
