Links Page

There are two reasons for the links page on your site.

The first is to have links to other companies and websites that may be of interest to your customers. The second is as a tool for getting others to link to you.

When you are considering what sites to link to you need to think about the following:

• Is the link going to help the client to decide to come to you? For example if you are a carpet cleaning company and you use the best carpet cleaning machines from Europe a link to their site would show customers the quality of your equipment
  
• Is the link going to distract the customer? This is one of the chief arguments for NOT putting a link to Facebook on your website. Think about it, you have managed to get the person to your site as they are interested in what you do, then you send them to Facebook, where they then start their 'usual' Facebook activity. There are guides to Facebook in the Marketing Advice section of this website, please take a couple of minutes to read them, they will help you use Facebook more effectively.

Make sure that when you put a link to a website that you test it is working, not just when you put the link in, but at least once every other month you should click on all the links and check if they still work and also if there are any changes to the destination site that might be worth knowing.

The Internet is a connected web of companies. The links between sites are what allow people to travel around the billions of pages of information.Getting other sites to link to yours allows you to

• get more traffic from their visitors
  
• increase your google ranking

Back links are good!

From the 'Google' point of view the more RELEVANT links you have pointing at your site the better your ranking will be. Relevant means just that, do not put links to sites that have no logical sense pointing at your site. This is why a lot of so called 'link building' schemes do not work. Be cautious if you are asked to pay someone to link 1000's of sites to yours, you are probably wasting your money.

However, that being said, you can establish your own 'back links' by being systematic and polite about it.

For example, if you are the Carpet Cleaner using the expensive European cleaning machines, email them and ask them to put a link on their site to yours.

If you have exclusive supply agreements with companies it makes logical sense for them to link their sites to yours.

Local links

Another form of relevant backlinks is from businesses in your geographical area. These may be your friends who have businesses or even your customers.

Linking to and from your customers might seem risky as it allows your competitors to see who you are working with and for, but on the flip side, if your customer is happy with what you do and has put a link on their site to yours, that is a sign of a long term on going relationship, as long as you keep the customer happy, they should not be tempted by other companies.

The most effective way we have found over the years to get people to link to your site is to first of all put a link from your site to theirs. By doing this you show them that you are serious about the link exchange. Then you contact them and ask if they can put a link back to your site.

This is a typical email you can send to a company you want to link to your site.

Good Morning (insert name if you know it)
We are an XXXXXXXXXX company operating in YYYYYYYYYY. We have recently added a link to your company website to our own as we believe that our customers would find your site interesting.

If you are able please could we ask if you could put a link from your site to ours at yourdomainname.co.nz as I am sure your visitors would find our site of interest and use.

Thank you in anticipation

etc...

Please feel free to adapt and use this for your own site.

Back...