Link Building Strategies

My last few blog posts have been focused on content writing and microsite strategies and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about link building strategies and how they play a role in achieving your keyword optimization goals. When you create a blog or a microsite and post a well written article, there is no immediate reason why the search engines should respect your new site or the content of the article.  Sites that have already established search engine "respect" can see their new articles on Google Page one very quickly, think CNN or the Huffington Post.

Creating Votes For Your Content

One way to establish respect for the content on your microsite is to start a link building strategy.  In simple terms, a hyper-link from a good website pointing to your home page or article is a "vote" for your microsite.  The word(s) that are hyper-linked and the title tag of that hyper-link helps to establish what the vote is about. If you have a blog article about Nissan Extended Warranty plans and you are able to build links from other reputable websites to this specific article with hyper-linked text like:

• Nissan Extend Warranty
• Nissan Warranty Plans
• Car Warranty Plans
• Nissan OEM Warranty Plans
• Nissan Security Plus Warranty Prices

then you have created votes for a few combinations of what consumers may type into Google to find your page.  The more links to your microsite or blog from reputable sources with good tags is beneficial for your organic search rankings.  The challenge is to find the best places to create these external links.  The related challenge is how to insert links that the search engines will follow. I don't want to get too technical but when you find places to post a comment, a blog entry or a new story, with a hyperlink in the text, some of these websites will intercept the hyperlink and add a "nofollow" tag.  This tells the search engines no to grant any link "juice" from the main website to your blog or microsite.  So not all links are equal and you have to "view the page source" to see if they are adding the "nofollow" tag.  If the site is add a "nofollow" tag look elsewhere.

Hiring A Link Building Company

I get about 5 emails a day from companies claiming to be able to build high quality links from India, the UK or some remote destination for a few hundred dollars.  Some of these companies confuse the issue by claiming that they are ISO certified and offer a wide range of "reputable" services.  The majority of these emails are scammers and more importantly, companies claiming to understand Automotive SEO when in fact they do not. If you want to build quality links to your main dealer website or any website that you own to increase its rankings, you need to be able to verify that the links that are being considered by the search engines.  Let me say that again.  If you hired someone to build links to your website, you should be able to find them using the Yahoo "link:" command.  The Yahoo link command works better than the Google link command, just accept that for now. Also, if you want to find good places to create links, check out all your competitors websites using the Yahoo "link:" command and see which websites are pointing to their domain.  You will find a number of sites that you never heard of that you may be able to create an account and create a similar post, directory entry or comment. You snoop by going to Yahoo.com and in the search box type:    link:www.autodealer.com , where "autodealer.com" is the website of your competitor.  Take a look at the "inlinks" to see which websites have links to their site.

Link Build Workshop

At the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp in Orlando, I will be conducting a workshop on how to create powerful link building strategies for your automotive websites; primary and your microsites.   Every dealer should have over 1,000 links to their main site and hundreds of links to their microsites over time.  If you build them manually, using a well thought out plan and leveraging high PageRank websites, you will see that your website and microsites will start to rank ahead of your competition. And remember, its easy to see which sites are linking to your competitors! Attendees to the Boot Camp will also get some exclusive free links from websites that I have compiled and in class we'll create new links that will help with your Automotive SEO strategy.