Why Link Building is Crucial for Your Online Store

Why Link Building is Crucial for Your Online Store

Setting up a website and online store is a great way to start a new business or expand an existing one. However, your online business won’t automatically start garnering visitors and generating sales. Obviously customers have to find your site before they start buying from it. There are many different tactics that you can use to help boost your online presence.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of tweaking a website to make it more attractive to search engines so it ranks higher on search results. The higher a site is in search results, the more likely it is to be clicked on.

While keywords and keyword research are the most well known SEO tactics, experts say that link building should make up 60% of your SEO strategy.  Link building will do more than just improve your rankings on search engines. If you link your keywords to related information you can boost your relevancy on search engines for these keywords and improve the apparent credibility of your site.

For links to improve your website they have to be inbound links – pointing to your website or to specific pages on your site. Better links come from higher-ranking websites. You can also do yourself a favor by interlinking the pages on your site and creating sources for inbound links on your own.

Here are five ways to incorporate link building into your Ecommerce site.

5 Link Building Tips for Ecommerce Sites

1.   Blogging/ Regular Content. Having regularly updated new content on your website is crucial. A website that is regularly updated will seem more relevant to both search engines and potential customers. You can do this by adding a blog to your page, or a news section. In your posts link you keywords to relevant pages inside your site, and important keywords to external pages as well.

2.   Social Media. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are a great way to spread awareness for your website and business. Create pages on these social sites, include links back to your website from your main social page. Then, as you post updates on your social site pages you can include links in these as well.

Be certain to provide compelling content that people will want to read about. If one of your social site followers shares your content with a friend, that’s another valuable inbound link.

Make sure to include a button on your website for your customers to easily follow you on your social networking page.

3.   Content Syndication. A great way to create more inbound links to your website is by syndicating your content. If you put out an Email newsletter to your repeat customers, you can A) post the newsletter in an archive on your site, and B) syndicate it on a syndication website. Both of these options will create another inbound link for your site. You can do the same with press releases. Obviously you must have links in this content directing to your site for this to work.
 
You can also syndicate articles from your news section on a website like ezinearticles.com. Make sure not to repost an article on your website that has already appeared on another page in your site. This is called duplicate content and it will have negative impact on your search rankings.

4.   Link Partnerships.  Inbound links from other sites are the best way to improve your search rankings through link building. But how do you get other sites to link to your content? Linking relevant information to their site is a good way. They may feel compelled to return the favor. Another way is through partnerships or agreements.
Search for other websites that share a niche with you, or that provide information that will benefit you to link to and approach them about adding links to their site in your content for them to do the same on theirs.

Another tactic is to “guest blog” on another website. Meaning you write content for them on a subject that you have expertise in, in exchange for this content on their site to include a link back to your site. They will then repeat the same process on your site.

5.   Local Links. Even though the Internet opens your business up to a much wider market, you probably still operate within a relatively small, local area. Whether you live in Texas, Massachusetts or Alaska, find other local businesses in your area that have websites and ask them to link back to your site.

Your city and/ or county websites might have a business directory or section for local businesses to post adds or links. Not only will this help your website’s link building campaign, but also it will give you greater exposure to potential customers in your area.

Now, this is a lot of information, and it seems like I’m telling you to link everything! But, this is certainly not the case. Be discrete and tasteful with your linking and, most importantly, make sure to link the keywords that your website is built around to relevant information. For example, if your keyword is bicycles and you link to CNN.com it won’t do you any good! Link bicycles to the page on your site where the bicycles are.  

There are several important keys to putting together a successful link building campaign: make sure to link your important keywords to relevant information, be sure that you’re linking looks and feels natural, and don’t link everything back to your home page! The other pages on your site need love too.  If you are still unsure about how to utilize this information, seek the guidance of a marketing consultant who has SEO experience.