Wednesday 31 August 2011

Building a External Link Profile & The Different Types of External Links

External links into your website are the most important factor if you want your website to rank and appear high on Google searches that are completed by potential customers 24 hours a day.

As everybody does, you want to see your website on a Google first result page, as statistics show that 99% of people will never go past the first page of search results when looking for a product or service. The higher your website is at the top of this first search results page, then the higher the probability that your website will be visited before your competitors.

If you want more traffic to your website, leading to more sales and an increase in customers for your business, then you must make sure that your site has as many good external links as possible, constantly building a good, solid external link profile for your website. If you aren't appearing in searches and are wondering why, then this could be the cause.

There are 4 main types of links that can appear on a web page. You should try and use all of these types of links to create a profile that will improve your websites position on Google search results. Like a spiders web, these links on other websites, blogs and social pages will also increase your chances of building traffic from other sources rather than just the search engines and the direct typing of your website address.

So the four different types of links:

The Informational Link

Informational external links lead to pages and websites that offer information related to the words that are linked in the text.

For example, if you want someone to contact you then you link the words "contact us" to your contact us page with information about you and your company. Externally an example would be "Local, National and International News" for the BBC or "Social Networking" for Facebook. Put either of those searches into Google and see who comes out on top?

How to get informational links to your website:
  • Contact people and businesses in your area of the market and ask them to provide you with a reciprocal link thinking hard about the words and coding that you want to use to link to your website
  • Sign up for free and paid directories that appear high in search results – with IMS stats you can the track the effectiveness of these directories and whether they are worth the improvement in search ranking and traffic they are generating

The Definitional Link

Definitional Links provide an extended definition of the linked words.

How to get Definitional Links to your website:
  • Create a load of pages that explains what you do, how you do it and what makes you better than others. Make these pages easy to find and link to them from other pages throughout your website. Then get people to link to these pages for definitions of terms.
  • Find and Contact people who write about you, your company and your business will link to your website to define terms.
The Referential Link

Referential Links are used for source citation: the British website with the most Links in 2011 was bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk was second and telegraph.co.uk follows at third place.

How to get Referential Links:
  • Create linkable content on your web pages. This could be information about your products and services, statistics, engineering of your products, results from a job etc…
  • Find blogs that are related to your business. Inform them about your linkable resources and ask them to link to your website.
The Promotional Link

Promotional links are Links that go to a page on your site promoting your products or services. The need to promote your website is crucial. If you cannot promote your own website then how to you expect others to also do it?

How to get Promotional Links:
  • Similar to the Informational Link, find sites that are related to your site and ask them to link to you in return for a reciprocal link.
  • Barter with other websites. If they link to your site, you could link to their site. Offer other incentives to link to your site (free product samples, advertisement on your home page etc.). 
  • Find related blogs and ask the found bloggers for a review of your site.
All these Links to and from your website are one of the main factors that determine the position of your web pages on Google searches.

Contact us at IMS today to help us improve your Links profile, increasing the traffic to your website and improving the amount of buying customers you are getting to your site. We can provide you with:
  • a detailed overview of the Links of your own website
  • a detailed overview of the Links of your competitors website
  • who and what websites to target
  • how to create linking code that will improve your Google ranking for chosen search phrases
  • how to create an ongoing strategy to build and improve your website link profile
Contact us at IMS Consulting today for more information on how we can help you to make the most out of the internet and its buying poteintial.

Monday 22 August 2011

Never Let Your Domain Name Expire Again with IMS Consulting

Did you know that the domain name that your website appears needs to be properly looked after and managed? Do you have full control over your domain name as it is legally your property if you have paid money for it to be associated with your business? Have you had problems in the past with getting access to your domain name control panel and the settings in there? Has your website gone down and emails stopped working because you domain name expired?

These are all things that we hear all the time at IMS and are one of the biggest problems that you can encounter from the running of a website. The domain name that your site runs on is the basis for a good internet marketing strategy.

IMS Consulting can help you to make sure that you domain name never expires again. If you domain name expires, then there is the chance that someone else can purchase the domain name and re-register it under their name, so you loose out on all the work that you have done in building up your brand through that domain. Even worse, your web company has actually registered the domain name in their own name meaning that it is not your intellectual property. This means that all the work you do on the internet will be wasted when you get a new website if you cannot then use this previous domain name.

Perhaps you are looking for a new domain name to go with your new website? Maybe you have had troubles with previous Web Companies not realising your previous domain name? IMS can help you here. We register all our domain names in "YOUR" name meaning that they are and always will be your property as long as you continue to renew their ownership.

To find out more about the Domain Name services that we offer at IMS please follow this link - Domain Name Management and Registration - for more information.