If You Don’t Link Love Yourself….

By x-eyedblonde via Flickr Creative Commons

How do you expect anyone else to link love you?

One of the reasons we suggest our clients use a blog in their overall online marketing plan is that search engines love to see activity. They love to see other sites linking to yours. The more inbound links the better. And if those links are coming from particularly active and relevant sites, that’s even better than better. It’s the betterest.

So how do you get that link ball rolling? It’s pretty unlikely that the big names in your industry will happen upon your site out of nowhere and write a link-filled and eloquent blog post about how amazing you are. (Although, Debbie Millman, if you’re listening, GrafiQa wouldn’t turn down any links you might be able to spare.)

It’s likely you’ll have to start by linking to yourself. And there’s no shame in that. We’ve even done it ourselves.

Your blog is your place to share wisdom and insights and passion about what you do. It’s the most natural thing in the world to illustrate that with links back to your own website.

At GrafiQa, we’re really passionate about Brand Development. We could talk about it all day long, because we believe that a well-designed and executed brand is absolutely essential to an organization’s success.

So we write about it a lot on our blog, and whenever appropriate, we link back to our site. It’s not a matter of trying to “trick” the search engine. You can’t do that, anyway, and you’ll be punished for trying.

It’s about sharing something of value and doing it in a way that has a better chance of attracting attention.