Local Business Marketing Strategy – What Are Backlinks and Why Do They Matter?

The most important thing you can do for your website’s local business marketing strategy and search engine optimization is to build backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites that lead back to your site. They serve two purposes: 1. They get more people to see your website by following the links 2. They get your site the love of the search engines In fact, search engines care more about backlinks than any keyword optimization you’ve got going on your site’s pages. Building backlinks should be your main strategy for getting your site indexed by the search engines and getting traffic. How Important Are Backlinks to your Local Business Marketing Strategy? Backlinks are extremely important. When search engines see that you’ve got a ton of quality backlinks from relevant websites, this tells them that your site’s worth noticing. They’ll then send people who are searching for keywords related to your site’s content. Notice I said ‘quality’ backlinks. You don’t want links from a bunch of junk sites leading back to yours. Not only will they get you zero traffic, they might actually get you penalized in the search engines. Backlinks should be high-quality and relevant. Avoid services that trade backlinks. 3 Ways to Get Backlinks to Your Business Website Article Marketing – Article marketing means writing articles in your niche and submitting them to article directory websites. Some sites let you put a link in the middle of the article. Most don’t, but you can put your link in the resource box at the end that says something like, ‘For more great weight loss tips, click here.’ Press Releases – The Web’s full of press release directories that give your site a juicy backlink. Write a one-page PR that tells the world about your site, your product, or your service. Guest Blogging – Guest blogging is the most time-consuming of these three methods, but it can yield incredible results. Find a few blogs that are relevant to your niche and have lots of readers. Write a blog post and email the owner of the blog asking them if they’d like a bit of free content. They’re almost always happy to accept submissions, and you get a very good backlink from the exchange. When looking for sites to get backlinks from, always check the site’s PageRank. This is a ranking system used by Google to rate websites on their quality and authority. You can use Google’s PageRank Checker to see how a site’s doing. They’re ranked on a scale of 1-10. The higher the PageRank, the more attention it gets from Google. Keep in mind that this measures the rank of a page and not the site as a whole. Check each page you’re thinking of submitting content to. When you think about it, SEO is a pretty simple Local Business Marketing Strategy. It’s all about tweaking your page so that it’s keyword-optimized and then building backlinks from quality sites to your own. You’ll see the traffic really start coming in when you’ve got some good backlinks going.