Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links — links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining “relevance,” the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that’s not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they’re more vital than ever.
How then, does one go about getting those precious nuggets of hypertext anchor tagging? Social Media maven and “Chief Nut” Kevin Skarritt, our good friend and strategic ally at Acorn Creative, offered up these 10 strategies on his “Nuts and Bolts of Brand” blog. Good guy that he is, he gave us permission to share those key linking strategies with you here. Hit it!
1. Blog Comments
Go out of your way to read other people’s blogs. Your Mother always told you that reading is good for you. She was right! But, when you do so, be sure to productively interact with those bloggers. It makes them feel good. It validates what they’re writing about. It starts up a relationship between the two of you. AND, here’s the best part, it gives you an inbound link to your site.
2. Blog Trackbacks
Start a blog and refer to all of those blogs you’re reading in the form of a “trackback” in your posts. Don’t know what this means? Check out the entry for “trackback” on Wikipedia, or go deeper with a Wordpress.org tutorial. However you learn more about this linking strategy, please do, because it’s a smart, easy, and effective way to get your website lots of inbound links.
3. Pay Per Click Advertising
Yes, PPC advertising is indeed an added marketing expense. However, it’s a controllable, predictable means to build ROI, and a great way to build inbound links where you have control over the text used in the link tag.
4. Participate On Industry Forums
Similar to blog comments and trackbacks, participating on industry forums will get you hooked up with other like-minded professionals, keep you abreast of current trends, and you get to build your inbound links in the signature line of your posts.
5. Build Other Pages
Some new social networking sites on the web allow you to create content and post it in their domain as new pages. One great example of this is Seth Godin’s Squidoo.com. By creating “lenses” that focus readers on a particular topic of interest, you get to engage readers and create more inbound links to your main site.
6. Wikis
The concept of a wiki (like wikipedia.org) is that readers also become content contributors. Anyone who is registered can log in and change content. Understand that other readers of this information-rich content have zero tolerance for salesy/advertising tactics, so, be careful with this one. Be purely informative and helpful with your newly posted content. If the content survives peer scrutiny, you’ll have a nice little inbound link that’s potentially seen by millions.
7. Social Networking
MySpace and FaceBook for sure, but there’s an explosion of social networking web sites out there. Dive in and start participating. Doing so allows you to interact with other professionals and, you guessed it, builds up inbound links.
8. Social Bookmarking
Different than social networking, social bookmarking is similar to how you used to bookmark sites in your browser but, instead, you bookmark your favorite sites publicly, in sites like de.licio.us, ma.gnolia.com, spurl.com, rojo.com, Google bookmarks … the list goes on and on. The goal is to have people discover these bookmarks, and then your site. An added benefit to social bookmarking (and blog posts) is you get to “tag” your content with words and phrases that are relevant to the content. These tags are used to identify the content in the search process.
9. Organized Surfing Sites
This is a variation of social bookmarking. There are sites that organize how people surf the web in an effort to make the process of finding the right content faster and more focused. StumbleUpon.com (available as a Firefox plugin) is one of my favorites but others like Technorati (blog content), Digg (blogs, articles and news stories) and newcomer Trailfire (another Firefox plugin) allow users to power-surf, finding your site via inbound links.
10. Link Begging
Don’t discount it just yet. Asking another site owner for a link sometimes still works. However, with all of the other options listed above, you’ll quickly learn that this tactic is largely time-consuming and unproductive.
Any good car salesman will recite the old adage, “plan your work and work your plan.” This especially holds true for your inbound link strategy. Whether you focus on one or set up a tactic to diversify, divide and conquer, don’t wait. The success of your website — and ultimately, your business — depends on it!
So you’ve optimized your website, done the keyword research, got the backlinks and everything is ethical. You’re sitting proudly on the first page of the search results. Or you’ve set up a pay per click campaign, bid on your keywords, created some ads and performance tracking is in place. Again, you’re at the top of the pile. Either way, you’re visible and people are visiting your website. But visitors aren’t converting into leads, prospects or customers. What’s going wrong? Well your website may be visible, but is it connecting?
Having attracted visitors to your website through prominent search engine placements, it is vital not to lose them by failing to connect. Different visitors will have different priorities and levels of satisfaction. In order to reach and retain as many as possible and to maximize the chances of conversion, you should consider your site’s usability and accessibility.
Web Usability
Usability is all about providing your visitors with an effective, efficient and satisfying experience. It’s common knowledge that visitors tend to glance at, and scan, pages rather than study them in any great detail. If the message and options are not clear, they may leave. If they don’t leave, the chances are that they will click on the first link that seems to be most relevant - it may not be the right one. Repeat the process a few times and soon a visitor can be lost, confused and frustrated. Either way the result is the same - missed opportuníty and little likelihood of a return visit.
The more self-evident your pages are, the greater the chance of converting the visitor into a prospect or customer.
12 Simple Tips for a More Usable Website
1. On the home page make it clear what the site is all about.
2. Make the purpose of each page obvious.
3. Use hierarchical headings to give clear structure to the copy.
4. Make the navigation and links obvious.
5. Use clear unambiguous wording.
6. Make the options and next steps obvious.
7. Remove any wording or imagery that is unnecessary, confusing or distracting.
8. Use consistent conventions throughout. 9. Include site search and a site map.
10. Make information such as contact details, pricing and delivery charges clearly accessible.
11. Make the pages printable by including a cascading style sheet for printing.
12. Don’t allow careless errors to make your site look unprofessional.
Browsers Create Their Own Set of Problems
One more tip - just because your website works fine in your browser of choice, do not assume that it will work equally well in all browsers. In fact it is not even safe to assume that it will work equally well in different versions of the same browser. Web designers who have had to cope with the incompatibilities of IE5, IE6 and now IE7 will no doubt testify to this point. It is vital to be sure that your website works on all the popular browsers. As well as IE and Firefox, don’t forget Netscape and Opera on Windows and Safari on the Mac. And just to muddy the waters a bit further, Apple has recently announced Safari for Windows.
So now your website is usable, but is it usable by everybody? For some, usability is just a small obstacle when compared to the barrier of accessibility.
Web Accessibility
All businesses in virtually all countries have a legal obligation to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities, otherwise they are discriminating. Given that something like 15% of the population have some sort of disability, that’s a sizeable market proportion. If you’re not reaching them, your competitors probably are.
One of the many myths surrounding web accessibility is that blind people are the only ones who need to be catered for. Whilst blind people and their use of assistive technologies to read web pages are an obvious and important example, consider also people with other visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and neurological impairments.
How does a color-blind person cope with page colors?
How does someone with a mobility impairment manage without being able to use a mouse?
How does a deaf person gain access to auditory content?
How does someone with attention deficit disorder make sense of the pages?
Web pages should be accessible to all of them. And it’s not just disabled people who will benefit. Older people, people with low literacy levels, people who are not fluent in the website language, people with low bandwidth connections, people using older technologies and people with short-term injuries and illnesses will also benefit.
9 Tips for a More Accessible Website
1. Provide all images with an alternative text description. If the image does not convey any information, provide null (blank) text rather than no alternative text at all.
2. Provide transcripts of audio content.
3. Ensure that the contrast between text foreground and background colors is sufficiently strong.
4. Do not use color alone to convey information. There should also be some other form of visual indicator such as additional characters, images or font changes.
5. Place column headings in the first row of a table and place row headings in the first column. If headings are ambiguous, use the HTML scope attribute to clarify.
6. Never use the HTML blink and marquee elements. For animated GIFs or other moving objects, the flicker frequency must be less than 2 Hz or greater than 55 Hz. But better to have no moving content at all.
7. Link text should clearly state the purpose and destination of the link. Phrases like Clíck Here may mean nothing to someone listening to a screen reader.
8. Provide an option to skip navigation on all pages. This will save screen reader users from having to repetitiously listen to the same navigation, and keyboard users from having to repetitiously tab through every item. Use hierarchical headers to provide the same benefit and to enable navigation through copy.
9. On forms, always associate prompts with controls so that each control is adequately described. Use the HTML fieldset and legend tags to give structure to complex forms.
The Importance of Web Standards
Usable, accessible web pages can only be achieved through strict compliance with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. They provide a platform for consistency, compatibility, stability, flexibility and extensibility. Implementing standards throughout a website’s design will address many usability and accessibility issues by default
Last and Certainly Not Least
Usability and accessibility alone will not suddenly convert all your visitors into customers. Content is vital to a website’s delivery capability. But at least those visitors may now stick around long enough to look at the content.