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Small Business SEO Needs Link Building The Most

Over the past week I have had many questions sent to me from small businesses asking me about link building and how difficult and time consuming it is. I even had one person say I was mis informing the visitors who come to my site by saying that link building strategies are mandatory to your sites overall SEO health and growth. So I dusted myself off and figured I would talk more about it and convenience this one visitor on how building links is necessary to their small business success on the Internet.

So why build links?

Boosts your rankings by what other people say (link). Search engines give more relevance to what others says about your site over what you say.
You drive highly qualified traffic to you site. These visitors are pre qualified and are in a good frame of mind to react to your product or services. Links are not just about rankings.
They build trust. Any link from a trusted site will make your site more trustworthy. This is a real good thing as for every trusted site there are hundreds that are not trustworthy.
They connect you to the authoritative people and sites within your industry. Kind of think of it as the original LinkedIn.
Links attract more links. Kind of think of it as the rich get richer!
They position you as a leader in the space or industry. They also make you harder to move out of the top search engine spots and make it near impossible to receive top placement if you don’t have them.

How to find inbound links?

Let’s talk about the challanges before we go into how to find quality links. The challanges are:

Finding
Evaluating
Organizing
Analyzing

Finding quality sites is not that hard really but it is time consuming and this is what trips people up. Start with competitor sites and use tools such as Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and SEOMOZ’s Open Site Explorer to find the sites you may be able to get a link from. This types of sites linking to them would be:

Directories
Business Partners
Trade Associations
Paid Links
Guest Blogs
Article Marketing Sites
Product Description Sites
News Sites
And More.

The goal is to find relevant and authoritative sites, not just any site to get a link from. They key is to find links from different domains giving you a diversified linking profile. This is what the search engines want to see. Remember, it’s about the number of different domains linking to you not the amount of links. Another good way to find good linking opportunities is to perform keyword searches on your favorite search engine. This will give you sites that have generated a diversified linking profile and in the search engines eyes are highly authoritative. People love to write and link about high authoritative web sites!

Link building is about good links. What is the difference?

Is it related to your industry?
Is the links followed by the search engines? Links that are no followed are just not as good as followed links. There are many tools out there to help you find no followed links but one I like is the SEO Book and SEOMOZ’s toolbars that incorporate this feature.
Are the pages with the outbound links indexed in the major search engines?
Does the site invite guest articles or blog posts?
Does the site itself have a good linking profile?
Has articles from the site been published anywhere?
Does it have quality content?
Does the content attract comments?
Are the links within the body copy of the article?
Do the links go away or are removed?

Sounds to good to be true right? Well, honestly it is not quantum physics but there are plently if things that can trip up the link builder such as:

Reason for linking not strong enough – you have got to get personal with your requests. Canned requests get you no response and no responses will burn out the people link building.
Not enough time researching link prospect – does the link builder real researching the site to see if it is owned by a sister company that shows the link as a backlink? I see this happen a lot.
Not linking to relevant websites – many link builders get see a directory or a form and run to fill it out without seeing if the linking site is a industry fit for your site.

So what does link building mean to your small business SEO?

Everything really as good rankings start and end with links and how your link profile is seen by the majority of search engines. The number and quality of links pointing into your website is one the most important factors in your online success. While on-page SEO, good spider crawl-ability, and quality content helps, it is the links that ultimately matter the most.

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has become a very powerful profile to have in your social media marketing. It is a great way for your business and yourself to communicate with other professionals, join groups, and drive traffic to your website. So, if you are thinking about social media in anyway, shape, or form LinkedIn needs to be at the top of your list to create and optimize. Let’s talk about how you do this:

Create A LinkedIn Action Plan

First thing you must do is create an action plan prior to signing up. Here are are the top action items your need to build out in your action plan:

Keywords to optimized your profile with
On page profile optimization
Apps
Tracking

Keyword Research and Decision Making

Use a keyword tool of your choice such as wordtracker.com or the Google keyword tool. Look for keywords that are highly descriptive of your products or services you offer. Your keywords should also lend to you being a expert in your industry. I use the keywords “Internet Marketing Specialist”.

On Page Profile Optimization

Just like your on page SEO, your LinkedIn profile has strategic areas within your profile that you can optimize for. Let’s take a look at the top areas and talk about them some:

Professional photo – We are not on Facebook or MySpace here. You are among professionals and nothing says “I am not a professional” than a non-professional photo. Do not us a good picture of you while you are out with your friends and you still have your buddies arm around you. People like faces and want to connect with each one of us. Do not use a logo or a full body shot.
Headline – Use your name and the keyword phrase you have chosen. For mine I have used “Frank Pipolo – Internet Marketing Specialist”.
Keywords throughout content – Use the keyword phrase that you have selected in your headline within the specialty and job description areas of your profile. Also use keywords that are related to your main keyword phrase. The key is to have these keywords flow within your copy without looking stuffed into it.
Sites area – In the drop down area make sure you use “other” as this will give you the opportunity to include your keywords when describing your sites. Use all of the three slots as they are valuable assets you have on your profile.
Recommendations – Of course these are a key to your profile as they show creditability but you can have them highly optimized by including your top keywords within them. Just ask the people you want to recommend you to use these keywords.

Applications

These are real jewels within your profile as they make your social media marketing on LinkedIn much easier and they maximize your profile potential. Use the apps that pull your blog and Twitter stream. One of my favorite is the Slideshare app that pulls all of your Slideshare presentations within your profile. You can also show a list of your favorite books. All of these things makes your profile fresh and will always allow your connections to see something has changed when LinkedIn sends its automated monthly email out.

Tracking Results

So like anything else, what does this optimization do for you? Here are some of the top key performance indicators (KPI) that you should look at:

Does your profile appear in the search results?
Have you received 100% score rating for your profile?
Increase in recommendations? By networking and building your profile you will hopefully be able to get unsolicited recommendations.
How many personal messages are you receiving in your LinkedIn inbox?
Is your profile being indexed and ranked within the search engines? You should at least have your profile show up when doing a search on Google for your first name. Good keyword selection will also allow you to rank for your chosen keywords.