Fantastic Friday: Building Better Links

It's Fantastic Friday again! How did a week speed by so quickly?

Today, I'm going to chat about building better web links.

Work at Home Moms are usually the chief cook and bottle washer in their business. You need to know how to help people FIND your website so that you can sell more and ultimately hire someone else to wash those bottles, so to speak.

We've all heard that the best way to drive traffic to your website via GOOGLE placement, is through link exchanges. This is because Google takes into consideration how many other websites are linking to yours to determine your websites relevancy to a particular keyword phrase. There are lots of other factors, but inbound links seems to be Googles' number one consideration.

When people are searching for your products, do they already know the name of your business? If so, then you want your inbound links to reference your company's name. For example, my business is called Shaka Studios. We sell much of our furniture through independent retail stores and we put our brand name on everything we make. So, it does make sense, for our particular company, that we promote our brand name through links.

However, if you do not sell wholesale, you most likely do not have a way to promote your brand awareness, so you need to go a different route. You need to concentrate on relevant search terms for your goods and services.

Shaka Studios makes custom furniture. Custom furniture is a very broad search term with 1.5 million Google results. So, while it is true that custom furniture is a relevant search term for Shaka Studios, there is too much competition for that term and it is not worth competing in that market.

The best links are specific, highly searched keywords, with little competition. Here is your step by step action plan:

1. Use Googles' External Keyword Tool to find relevant terms for your goods and services.
2. Search each term on Google to find out how stiff is your competition. If a particular keyword phrase turns up more than 500K results, cross it off your list.
3. Pick the 5 to 10 most important keywords left on your list. Those that pertain most to the products or service that make you the most profit or give you the most pleasure to craft.
4. For each of your 5 to 10 most important keywords, create a separate web page that uses the keyword in the URL, title and Header1 fields. If you do not know how to do this, ask a web designer for help. It is worth paying a professional to do it correctly. Most shopping cart software will do this automatically. I created a page for the keyword phrase cherry queen size bed because the phrase had less than 500k Google results. Notice my link points directly to that page. (This is called a linked keyword phrase.)
5. Find directories, websites, blogs, networking groups that are relevant to your industry and place ads, exchange links, blog, network with the group using your keyword phrase in relevant sentences making sure the phrase is linked to the page you created in step 4. You also want to make sure you use the linked keyword phrase on other pages of your own website. If you do not know how to do this, ask your web designer to show you. It is in your web designer's best interest to help you, because she has placed a link to her website on your website and the more people that see your site, the more that will see hers.
6. Stay on top of your keyword phrases and adjust them as necessary.

It takes time and patience to develop your list of keywords, create the web pages, and find good places to put your links, but it is worth the effort if you want to drive more traffic to your website.

Have a fantastic Friday!