The process of generating natural links from either members of your community or other people who own websites within your demographic is not easy for small business owners. Over time we have seen that the best way to do this is to do these two things:
- Get out there and engage with members of your online community via forum postings, Facebook, Twitter, and other social avenues; and
- Participate on some of your fellow colleagues websites via comments, etc.
The difficulty many new beginners have with the creation of a website, particularly one that doesn’t get any natural search traffic, is that they generally only get traffic that lacks any community oriented appeal. Initial content for the majority of sites is primarily sales copy, and undeniably sales copy is a challenge to get natural links to because no one actually wants to share with friends or community pages where something is being sold.
Create Content Worth Sharing
With this in mind, the understanding that it is important to find a way to create content that is worth sharing (be it your community or fellow colleagues) is the best way to generate natural links back to certain pages on your site. You don’t necessarily, as a small business owner, need to links to link directly to your sales copy. As long as you have link juice coming to some pages on your site, that link juice will inevitably translate through internal links back to all the important pages.
Creating content that is worth sharing for your community and for your fellow professionals is one way to undoubtedly improve the likelihood of links being built by others for you.
The Importance of Engagement
Of course much of this content will be essentially invisible unless other people out there understand that this content is truly a value. This is where social engagement, blog commenting, and forum posting all come in to play. The best content is the content you should push forward through community involvement. Pushing sales a content is not necessarily going to get you inbound links.
An Example of a Healthy Content/Engagement Approach for Link Creation
Let’s imagine that you are a real estate agent in the city of Phoenix. Let’s also imagine that you have a website, and that you want this website to receive a ton of link juice so that you can rank naturally for a variety of terms that you build pages for.
One basic approach is to do something like create pages on your site that help highlight school rankings within different cities in the region. These are the sorts of pages that you could easily share with members of your community, never mind other blog owners who work in the realm of education or real estate; and it is these types of pages that will fetch you the most valuable link juice, link juice which can then be spread throughout the rest of your site through internal links.
