Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings with Link Partners.

As you may know, I believe that pay-per-click advertising with companies like Google Adwords or Overture is very quick and effective for getting instant traffic and for testing new products and ideas with minimal investment. I always suggest this as the first form of internet marketing to try.

However, once a product, service or an idea has been proven to sell with pay-per-click ads, I would suggest including a search engine optimization strategy to your marketing plan. Search engine optimization is where you attempt to optimize the web site itself for the web pages to rank well in the search engine search results. I suggest search engine optimization as something to do after pay-per-click, because search engine optimization cost much more time and money to get started so it would be good to be sure that your product, service or idea is proven to sell before investing much more resources upfront.

Now, search engine optimization includes three different components for good search engine rankings. They are the following:

1. Age – the age of your web pages is a factor of ranking well, particular on Google. All else being equal the older a web site is the better chance it has to rank better.
2. Content – good content includes quantity and quality of text content on your web site. The more relevant content you have relating to a particular search term, the higher you should rank for the search term, all else being equal.
3. Popularity – link popularity is also very important for increasing your search engine rankings. This is where a web site links to your web site. Search results are affected by how many links you have from quality web sites.

Today, I will be focusing on the link partners as a way to improve your web site’s popularity. I have been experimenting a lot lately with link partners and have found some very favorable results. I will use our Champlain Coffee web site as an example.

Before we started our link exchange campaign, Champlain Coffee ranked on somewhere on the 3 page of search results of Google for the term “low acid coffee“. After about a month of our link partners campaign, it ranked #9 on the first page of search results on Google and as of this date, it still ranks there, occasionally fluctuating between #7 to #9. We have determined that this could be the only cause for the increased ranking as the ranking was stable for several months before and starting going up as soon as we started our link exchange campaign. We did nothing else to increase the ranking.

We have since determined that about 20-25 link partners combined with good content and time should get you to the first page of search results. This does require that the link partners be related to your web site in terms of content and the link partner’s web site must be of good quality.

We would be glad to help you form a link partner strategy, search engine optimization strategy, pay-per-click strategy or full internet marketing plan. Just click here to send me a message or call us at 802-735-2149.