As we know from here and our search engine optimization knowledge center articles, websites linking to you is a signal to the search engines that your site is important. The more links you have pointing to your site, especially from sites with higher PageRank, the higher your rankings in the search engines will be.
Creating great content for the purposes of getting links isn’t a new idea – search engine optimization experts have been talking about it for years but many small commercial sites still haven’t jumped on the bandwagon.
Why not? We could speculate all day long bit I imagine it probably has a lot to do with the fact that creating valuable content is a daunting task that requires a lot of research and time. But unless you offer a well known brand or have pics/videos that draw a lot of interest, you’re not going to get very far without it.
Fortunately, there are places on your website you can spruce up to get other sites linking to you. Four places you can reinvent on your site to get more links include:
Product pages
Product pages typically are not fertile link building grounds – most only contain prices, specs and not a lot of content. They’re usually contained on pages that have a dynamic URL – one factor that prevents search engines from even crawling the page!
Make product pages more linkable by focusing on 1 or 2 products at a time. Change them over to a static URL with unique content promoting your “featured product” of the month of something like this. Contact bloggers and other people in your niche market and ask them to write about your featured product and link to the page.
Company news page
Unless you’re a part of a big brand that’s unveiling a revolutionary product, most people don’t care what’s going on at your company. Stand to reason you’re not seeing much progress if you’re simply using your blog to write about internal company news. You need to engage your target audience!!
Use press releases and other avenues like blogs to announce company news that impacts people outside your company. Contests, awards the company is giving out, new products and services, etc. And don’t be shy – if you’re company has a good human interest story to tell, by all means do so.
Have a new job opening you’re trying to fill? Create a job openings page on your site and contact blogs, job sites and other social media networks to let them know.
Links page(s)
Most link pages you come across are simply thrown together…they welcome just about anybody to put a link there. Compiling a comprehensive list of useful resources for people or simply re-arranging what you already have can bring you hundreds of links.
Articles or Sales Pitches
If you have great content or articles purely for educational, reference or entertainment purposes, good for you!
But if you’ve never promoted it, then it’s still one step away from linkable. Share articles you’ve invested a lot of time in researching and writing. Research other sites in your niche and see what they’re putting up. Do you offer something new to the conversation?
If you don’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to re-write everything but maybe all you need to do is add a different perspective or an analogy to make a complex subject more understandable for laymen.
While it takes time and a lot of work to build links to your site, it can pay off with persistence. But taking your old site, dusting it off and adding some shine can take it from static to a useful, and linkable, resource that people will follow.