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You’ve spent several weeks laboring over your website, your project is finally complete, and your company or organization is now live on the internet. You show your family, friends, relatives and business colleagues. It was hard work, but your proud of it and glad you went through the process. Then one day you get a call from someone you know, who says they went to look for your company in a search engine and weren’t able to find you, so they thought he should let you know. You fire up your computer type, your company name into Google, and you’re nowhere to be found. You go over to Yahoo, not there either, MSN … ASK.com the results are the same you’re not there, in fact your website is invisible to the online world!
For most small and local businesses this fairly common problem, however many businesses don’t know what to do about it. To solve the problem you need to understand how search engines work and how you can increase your visibility to them. Search engines have programs that move across the web reading pages on websites. When they encounter a link they make a note of it and come back and read the content of that page at a later date. The designers of search engines had a sense of humor so they named these little programs that crawl across the web “spiders”. The best way to get the spiders to “find” your company and website is to get a link on another website.
There are a lot of different ways to get links, some are very easy to get, some are very hard to get and some will cost you money. Some of the more common places you can get links are chamber of commerce, business trade organization, networking groups, directories, press releases, syndicated articles, blogs, and link exchanges. Each of these types of links has some good and bad points associated with them, and we’ll go through these in subsequent parts. However as a general rule of thumb the more links you can get pointing to your website the better.
A second point and equally important aspects of links is understanding that not all links are created equal. Search engines think some links are more important than others. For example a link from your brother’s auto body repair shop is probably not as important as a link from CNN, The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times. So while getting links is important, getting higher quality links is the ultimate goal.
In Part II we’re going to look at Getting Links from Business and Trade Organizations.
