Inbound, outbound, and internal links are important factors in the calculation of your website page rankings with the search engines.

Unfortunately what most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t understand is that not all links are created equal. In fact, some links can help your website and some links can hurt your website.

Think of it like this: Associating your website with links to low quality websites like link farms, links that are misleading, links that are irrelevant, or links that are broken is like hanging out in the bad neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks.

No one wants to go there and calls to action are more likely met with skepticism and distrust. Also, the search engines don’t want to send people there because they’ll be unhappy and mad.

Associating your website with links to high quality websites, industry related sites, authority sites, and good links, is like hanging out in the glamorous country club gated neighborhood.

Everyone wants to go there and the calls to action are met with excitement. Also, the search engines love sending people there because they’ll appreciate it and be happy.

Here are some tips to consider when building links for your website:

• Internal links make it easier for users to get more information on what they are reading and to access the information they need faster.
• Outbound links need to go to websites that are relevant to the content you have on your page that the user is reading. The anchor text for the links also must match the content.
• Inbound links are very difficult to get and are hard to control. Monitor your inbound links and if someone unrelated to your business or industry links to you with no good reason, ask them to remove the link. Do not submit your website to random directories and do not agree to link trade with people you do not know and who are not relevant to your business.

What do you think about link building?

Updating your website content for your readers and the search engines is one of the most important things you need to be doing on your website. One of the easiest ways to consistently provide fresh and focused content is through blogging.

You can read our blog post Blogging for Business: 3 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Blog to learn more about how blogging helps business.

When it comes to blogging, linking new posts to old blog posts is a key strategy to keep all of your content relevant and help your readers easily find more on the subject you are writing about.

As your blog grows, especially if you are blogging three or more times per week, trying to remember or find what you have written about in the past can be incredibly time consuming. And, trying to remember what pages and what other blog posts you have linked to is almost impossible.

Unfortunately, this information is extremely important.

For example, say you post a few posts to your blog and link back to a page on your website. But then, down the road you rename or delete that page. Guess what? Those blog posts now contain broken links, which are bad for the user and bad for your search engine optimization results.

The best way to organize and track your posts and links is to use a spreadsheet, such as excel, to organize your blog content with the following columns:

• Category:
  Your blog posts on your spreadsheet should be grouped by article or post category, such as Web Design, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, etc. Organizing your spreadsheet by category will allow you to see how many articles or posts you’ve written on each subject, what areas you haven’t covered, and what areas you could elaborate on.
• Post Date:
  This is important when trying to decide what to blog about. You can look at your post dates within each category and see what you haven’t written about lately. Delivering a new post in category you haven’t written about in a while with links to the old posts will help your content remain relevant.
• Title:
  Unique and well written headlines are the difference between a user clicking your link and reading your post or skipping over it. Tracking your titles in your spreadsheet will make it easy to see what headlines you have used in the past to avoid duplication.
• URL:
  This is simply the web address of the post and an efficient spot to grab the code when creating links for new posts.
• Linked To/Linked From:
  Keeping track of what your posts are linked to and linked from is important for many reasons. If you delete or rename an old post or web page and break a link, your readers will receive a website error. This is bad for both the user and search engines. Linking other pages on your site to your blog is also a great way to for your readers to get more content of what they are looking for.

So, whether you decide to do it yourself, or hire your virtual assistant to do it for you, dedicate time now to get you blog organized before it gets even bigger. Trust me, it will only get harder.

If you would like help building and organizing your blog, contact Bourn Creative CEO Brian Bourn at brian@bourncreative.com to schedule a consultation!

Well, believe it or not, there actually is a huge difference between the type of links that can help your website with your search engine ranking and the type of links that can hurt your search engine ranking.

Links that help your website:

Good links are links to or from other high quality websites that have been deemed as valuable by the search engines. Links from authority websites help increase your search engine results, and help you get found more often. The same is true for industry-related websites that are updated frequently with fresh content.

For example, if you are a dog groomer, links from a pet store or veterinarian would been seen as more valuable than a link from a CPA’s website.

Examples of good links:

• Links to/from resources that relate to the content
• Links to/from more information on the topic
• Links to/from other valuable businesses in the industry
• Links to/from trade association
• Links to/from other points of view on the topic

Links that hurt your website:

Bad links are links to or from other websites that search engines have deemed as low quality, been associated with spam, operate as link farms, or practice unethical search engine optimization practices. The same is true for websites that have zero relevancy to your business or your target market. These links actually hurt your search engine results.

Examples of bad links:

• Links to/from a link farm website
• Links to/from spam websites / emails
• Links to/from a website with no relevance to the content
• Links to/from an explicit website
• Deceptive links that lead the user somewhere unexpected

Do you know of other good or bad link information? If so, please share it with me!