Years of SEO collaboration with financial services professionals has taught me one thing: Link building has to be the most challenging part of internet marketing plans for financial advisors. Not only is it an intricate mechanism to understand but also an even harder thing to do effectively.
Unlike creating content for websites, researching keywords, defining a social media plan and starting a blog, which can be achieved and controlled by any web savvy business owner, link building success is time consuming, depends on carefully crafted marketing plans and involves the participation of third party individual that are out of one’s control.
Why do you need to build links?
If you have read my last articles on optimizing website content and researching keywords, you should know by now that these steps are important, yet are just a small part of the equation when it comes to driving traffic to your site, converting leads or ranking on the first page of Google, Yahoo or any other major search engine. It is inbound links (external websites linking to your site) that contribute the most to the increase in traffic and the success of your search engine optimization plan.
For those who have been reading about link building, you’ve surely come across the following terms:
‘anchor text‘ or ‘authoritative site’
What do these words mean? Both contribute in the value and power of an inbound link, let’s see how:
- Anchor text
This is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It can be optimized by displaying a keyword phrase, which will help your site to rank high when someone does a search for your keyword phrase in their preferred search engines. Financial Advisor Websites is an example of a good link, we want to rank high because this is what we specialize in.
- Authoritative sites
Search engines attribute a higher value to links coming from high authority / high trust domain such as DMOZ, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Directory etc. Therefore the same link as above coming from a little known website would have less impact in our ranking then if it was coming from a popular website like Adobe.com or Cnet.com
How can you get good links?
By now, you should know why you need good links, and what they represent, so let’s look into what makes a good link building strategy. First of all, we need to understand the different kind of links available and what are the different techniques and methods that we’ve seen succeeding.
Before we go further, you should have a tight keyword strategy defined; you should also have your website pages optimized with these keyword phrases and finally, you should know which pages need to rank high in the search engines.
Links that you can build yourself
As I was mentioning before, there are 3 different kinds of links you can expect to build around your website. This first set requires little time investment and research.
These links can be built around online business directories where you can simply submit your domain url, company name, description of your business and sometimes a set of keywords. Some might charge a fee for submission or take some time to be approved. You should definitely submit your site to Yahoo! Directory, Aboutus.org, Joe Ant, Bestoftheweb just to name a few.
You can also create a company profile on most social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking websites. They are usually free and can allow your target audience to find you on their favorite social site.
If you or one of your employees is particularly good at writing articles, you should definitely submit relevant content in the form of articles, news and press releases to major syndication websites. At that stage you might want to hire a PR or SEO firm to facilitate the process for you. If done the right way, this will increase your exposure and increase your ranking for the keywords contained in your content.
Links coming from your networking efforts
These links will demand a great deal of patience and will rely on your ability to build relationships.
The idea behind it is to be invited as a guest article author. First, you will have to network, engage, mingle with people interested in the same topics as you; it’s a bit like self promotion but with a twist: you need to provide value as an incentive for others to link back to you.
I recommend reading lots of blogs talking about your industry, learning about the author, then commenting on their articles and when the time is right, engaging them in a 1 on 1 communication via email or twitter for example. The links you will get from these articles will greatly contribute to your ranking and will likely generate a good deal of targeted visits.
Links coming from others
At this stage, you should have a built a group of people willing to follow you. This is where the fun begins. You will have to concentrate of creating great articles, valuable information and engaging content. Focus you attention on growing your network, building stronger relationships and nurturing these connections, good links will naturally come your way.
This marks the end of our three-week series on Search Engine Optimization. My next set of articles will highlight the pros and cons of Search Engine Marketing. See you next time.