Acquiring Links, Improving PageRank, Social Network Marketing
Once your website is fully optimised, complete and submitted to search engines, the next step is to acquire quality relevant links pointing to it.
Apart from on page optimisation, one of the main ranking criteria for the major search engines is Link Popularity, or as Google calls it PageRank. This is basically a measure of how important your website is according to the number of quality, relevant links pointing to it. As far as these search engines are concerned, if a relevant website links to yours then this counts as a vote in favour of your website and assumes some importance and so attaches more relevance to it. The more good quality links, the more important it deems your website and so increases your rankings accordingly.
There are a few ways of increasing the number of links pointing to your website such as reciprocal link exchanges, purchasing links on other sites or directories, directory submission, social bookmarking such as sharing on Facebook and Twitter, press releases and many more.
Although acquiring links can be a time consuming process, and the success of such actions difficult to quantify, it is a very important process and time or budget should be dedicated to this. Be careful when allowing other link building companies to acquire links for you, as these can often be of little relevance and very low quality.
Many sites offer link exchanges or paid links at affordable prices, such as here on ourweddingmemories. If you do not yet have a listing with us then, if you are a UK based wedding photographer, please register here.
Search Google or the like for relevant search phrases and approach the sites which come high up as these will be relevant to your service. Ask for a link exchange or price to purchase a link on their website. However, ensure that the page where your link will reside is indexed by Google and within one or two clicks of the home page. Offer a similar quality link in return.
When another site adds your link, try to ensure that the anchor text of the link includes your main phrase you wish to be found by. This is the text that you actually click on. Also try to get this phrase into the title tag of the link.
As a wedding photographer, the code of the link should look similar to this:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com" title="Wedding Photography">Your Business Name - Wedding Photography</a>. It is useful to have your link code available on your website so people can copy and paste it directly into their own site.
Over time increase the number of links you acquire in this way.
Facebook, Twitter, Social Networking
Social networking links are becoming more relevant and important in the eyes of search engines. The nature of a social network is that friends or people with similar interests will share information. If a web site link is shared between a network of people then the search engines believe this website should have more importance and relevance added to it. As well as helping to improve general search engine rankings, social network links can also generate useful direct traffic. The chances are that those sharing your links are interested in the same things to some extent and if a friend or contact shares the information, then they see this as a recommendation, convincing them to take a look also. If they like what they see they are likely to share this too with their friends and contacts. This increases the viral marketing nature of such services.
There are a number of ways of improving the Social Networking Optimisation of a website. You can add share buttons to your pages so if a visitor clicks them they can automatically share this page or information with their contacts. You can create your own profile including your website link. Profile pages on Facebook are not currently public or indexed by Google (April 2010) but may well be soon. Twitter profiles are public and so links on these pages can be indexed over time.
Once you have your Facebook profile you can create a Facebook group or Fan page. Facebook fan pages are public and can be indexed by search engines. Ensure you add your website link to this page, always including the http://. Once the page is complete, invite your friends and contacts to become a fan of your page, this will then share this information between your friends contacts. Ask them to share the page with their contacts.
Search the site for similar related fan pages and become a fan of that page. Once done you can then write on the wall of the page remembering to include a link back to your fan page as well as a link to your website. Again always include the http://.
You can also post your link to contact profiles on Twitter in a similar way as above.