Small business owners doing business online should be prepared for heavy competition. More companies are establishing an online presence and some are moving their entire operation online to save money on overhead. Search engine marketing is critical to online business success and every small business search engine marketing campaign should include a focus on linking.
Link building is one of the most effective ways to optimize a Web site with major search engines. Algorithms used by Google and other major search engines utilize link data. Small business owners in the skin care industry are in the same boat as all others. To direct more traffic to their sites, they must improve their online visibility. Developing a linking campaign is an easy and effective way to do this.
By linking to a website, a business becomes a testimonial for that site. The value of an outgoing link is determined by the popularity of the current page and the total number of outgoing links this page has. Therefore, if a reputable external page links to a page on the skin care entrepreneur’s site, the search engine ranking of the skin care site improves. Skin care business owners should develop relationships with owners of related, non-competitive businesses to get links from their sites.
Though there are ways around this natural process of linking, entrepreneurs should avoid them. Joining an automated linking program can get a site banned by search engines. Most search engines have protective measures to prevent abusive linking. Getting a huge number of links from one site is also not as effective as getting one link from each of one hundred different and reputable sites.
An easy and effective way to establish a link building campaign is to submit the skin care website to Web directories. These are used by many sites and subject to human editing so they are quite valuable. Popular directories include About, Yahoo! Directory, and the Open Directory Project. Once the site has an array of inbound links, the entrepreneur can pursue links from sites that also link to the competition.
Words used in links and the sources of links are important for establishing authority with search engines. Small business search engine marketing campaigns should focus on these. Downloading the Google Toolbar will provide the PageRank for each page of the website and information regarding incoming links. However, keep in mind that PageRank is just one aspect of link reputation.
