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The third important step in search engine optimization is improving your web of links. Our ficticious company "Search Engine Carrots Inc.," got their act together on the marketing side and rewrote page content to sell their product, and fixed their HTML tags to optimize their homepage content and keywords for search engine crawls.
Unless your firm is a trusted provider for search engine companies (usually reserved for the big companies) you will have to work to have your website linked from other sources.
It may be your company practice not to link to anyone else, but that doesn't mean no one will link back to you. Start with your customer base and vendors. Some of those "happy customers" the marketing team praises may be good candidates to approach for a link to your company website.
Company vendors often times will link to you upon request as it shows their business relationships with happy clients.
Build a community of links to your website. First, check who may be linking to your website today by typing "link:http://www.yourcompany.com" into search engines for a list of links. Second, contact those target companies you would like to have linked to your website and negotiate.
Do your company employees blog? Do they have personal websites? If 20 employees link to their employer's website, you've added that many links and improved your relevancy to search engines.
Third, where do you link? If your policy is not to link to commercial websites, consider not-for-profit organizations that your company supports. If your company has received press coverage, link to the article. Linking past your domain will help search engine results avoid concluding your domain is a dead end. You can have too many links... stick to a range between five and 12.
The more websites linking to our Search Engine Carrot Inc.'s website, and the the better organized its content and HTML; the more search engines will realize value in this website and thus improve overall search engine results for the target terms.
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