I frequently hear the comment that “my website isn’t working!” “How come I’m not showing up on Google?” “Why aren’t I getting any orders?” If this is how you feel, read on…

In order for Google to know about your site it is absolutely critical that you have inbound links to your site. All to often, the people who can’t be found on Google simply don’t have anyone linking to them. YOU need to go out and start doing some link building! Link from Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, coupon sites, directories, etc. all links to your website where ever you can. These are also called “backlinks”. Notice we are not talking about you linking to other sites, we are talking about other sites linking to you!

The links that you add should contain the keywords as the anchor text. For example, if you want to get found in a Google search for the term “horse blankets”, then the link from the referring site should use the words “horse blankets” to link to your site. Preferably the page that this link points to is a page that is named “horse_blankets.htm” and has a title tag of “horse blankets”. The page should also use the words “horse blankets” within the text on the page. 

What this tells Google is that here is another website that thinks your site is important for the term “horse blankets”. When the Google robot follows that link, it finds a page named horse blankets, has a title of horse blankets, and the content is all about horse blankets. Therefore this page must be pretty important for that search term. Now if you can get 100 different websites all linking to your website for the same search term, I can assure you that you will start to get noticed. The problem is, no one is doing this! So 100 links for a particular search term will make you look really important to Google – it’s like someone voted for you 100 times! (You usually need about 100 of these inbound links however, 3 or 4 isn’t enough).

So how do you know which keywords / search terms to target? Obviously, you want to target terms that are actually relevant to what you have to offer. If you want to learn more about keyword research and how to track where your links are coming from, join us for a free seminar in Denver on August 29^th. Sign up by clicking here.