Link Buildling for the DIY Internet Marketer

I have worked with quite a few small businesses and other professionals and this is a skill that many have yet to master. Basic HTML skills can help you do some of your own internet marketing.  Furthermore, this will save you money and time by not having to call your webmaster every time you need to modify your website or blog.

Let’s say you have a blog and a company website, both reside on the same domain. Your Blog address might be www.mycompany.com/blog and your website might be www.mycompany.com. If you write a blog post and link it to a more informative page located somewhere on www.mycompany.com then you are performing Interlinking. This plays many benefits when your trying to marketing & optimize your website for the search engines. First it will point Google to the pages which are important on your website. Second it will help your pages get indexed faster. Next it will create an SEO benefit by showing Google pages which are relative to the keyword you linked from your blog post.

Second Scenario would be that you have a blog located at lets say www.mycompany.blogspot.com and you have a company website located at www.mycompany.com.  You are now getting into link builiding using anchor text. This is even more beneficial for optimizing your website. Lets say your blog post has some great original content. You update it quite a bit and you are using keywords on that blog which relate to your businesses products or services.

First, a couple words of advice. Don’t go overboard with keyword spamming and linking. A normal sized blog post should only cover one to two topics at most. Which means, you should only be linking one or two keywords back to your website, preferably different pages. If you can do this, you are well on your way in helping your website rank higher for keywords and gain some better page rank. This does not happen over night so be patient. Sooner or later you will see a rise in rankings and most probably your Page Rank.

The rest of this article covers how you can link keywords using Basic HTML.  You do not have to be an expert or have any experience using HTML. If you can read and follow the steps below, then you are good to go.

HTML Linking a keyword to a web address (hyper linking)

Instead of just typing out your address in your content or a blog post you can link a keyword in your content to a specific page without having to show the actual address on the page. This saves a lot of time and benefits your website by linking relative keywords to it. Here is an example. Let’s say I am writing a blog post (which I am).

“Clicked Solutions helps local businesses connect with potential customers through Search Engine Marketing, contact us for a free quote here www.inbound.inc”
Instead, I would hyperlink the keyword “Search Engine Marketing” to the web address and remove “contact us for a free quote here ……”.

“Clicked Solutions helps local businesses connect with potential customers through Search Engine Marketing“
Now you are only seeing the word “search engine marketing” and it will most likely be underlined which shows the reader it is a link. This link will lead to the page stated.
If you want to get more advanced keep reading.

HTML HYPER LINK TITLE TAGS.

Have you ever gone to a website and hovered over a link and a small piece of text pops up. Well, this is excellent for SEO, this tells search engines what your link is about. If the page you are linking to is relevant, you have just scored one point for your website. A rule of thumb is to link your keywords to relevant pages on your website. Otherwise, you are not scoring any points at all and Google’s spiders can decipher this type of linking.

Go ahead and hover over this link Search Engine Marketing. Yes it says “houston seo services”. Below is how you would accomplish this.

This can go before or after the URL just make sure it stays within the first set of greater than and less than brackets.

Ok now that you understand the HTML part of backlinking, let’s talk about WYSIWYG editors, short for ‘what you see is what you get”. Most editors have a toolbar and let’s use WordPress as an example. When writing a post you will see a bunch of icons at the top which resembles Microsoft Word’s Tool Bar. To the Right you will see two buttons called “Visual” and “HTML”. In order to do the HTML portion discussed earlier, you will need to click on “HTML”.

If your blogging software has a WYSIWYG editor then first high light the keyword you want to link. Next look for the link icon on the toolbar, which is usually an image representing a chain link like the image below.

Once you receive the popup window you want to fill in the link and title.  Make sure you use a descriptive title and the link is correct. After saving your post I would suggest clicking on the link to make sure it works.

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