Before You Seek Links Get Your Website Right

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

You wouldn’t believe how many people I speak with who want to dive in and start an aggressive link building campaign and I look at their website and it is still so far behind in the optimization category it is not even funny. You need to make sure your website is 100% efficient before you even try to start a link building marketing campaign.

Before you focus on building links to your website, focus on your website first, consider looking at:

1. Website Design – Is your design at least up to par? You don’t want to send people to a website that hasn’t been updated in 6 years. You wouldn’t walk into an interview wearing a suit from the 60’s would you? Same rules apply.

2. On Site Optimization – Is your website even optimized for search yet? If you are not sure what that means you need to look into this before you decide you want potential clients finding your website. Here are some key points to make sure you have in place with your on site optimization:
• Is all your meta information custom crafted to the content on that specific page?
• Do you have enough content? I understand that people like to build sites taking minimalist approach sometimes but search engines can read white space. They need actual text to feed on so if you don’t have any text you will not rank anywhere.

• Do you URL’s look clean and friendly? If you URL’s have a long string of characters that flow across the whole URL bar in your browser you need to clean those up first. They need to be targeted, clean and specific to the content on that page
• Remove anything that might be frowned upon by the search engines. If you have pages with hundreds of links sitting around you need to clean that up. Make sure all links are pointing to relevant websites as well if you must have external links.

3. Conversion Aspects – Very important to have in place. What good is website traffic when they don’t have a clue what to do when they make it to your website? Do you want leads? Phone calls? Don’t assume anyone is going to look for a contact us page. These elements need to be in place before you start sending traffic to your website otherwise people will just leave your website and we don’t want that.

Your website is the foundation to your marketing so make sure everything is in place before you get going on any external marketing efforts. Have a solid foundation in place and you will see great results.