The Road to Online Success
Even if you aren’t a part of the web savvy, tech obsessed crowd, you still probably have a general understanding of the importance of the hyperlink. The link is at the heart of the web, allowing users to navigate their way through countless pages. They are the roads that allow us to travel to our online destinations.
A good way to understand the importance of links in relation to your catering website is to picture your website as a shop that you just opened up in the middle of a huge field, with no roads leading up to it. How will your customers ever find you? By getting other similar shops and stores with complementary services to build roads from their business doors to yours, so that customers who are likely in need of your services can easily get to your shop.
Bigger, well-established stores that are known and trusted by customers will send more business your way, i.e. Authority Websites. These authority websites are often referred to as expert websites. These sites tend to have strong content, a large number of indexed pages and a large number of incoming and outgoing links to related sites that focus on similar themes and keywords. This abundance of inbound links from related websites is a good indicator in Google’s eyes that this site is an authority in that niche.
These are the kind of shops that you want to have creating pathways to your store. You do not however, want people building roads to your store from shady shops (i.e. Link Farms) Having these establishments creating pathways to your store will not send customers that are likely to buy from you and will only hurt your business.
As more and more credible stores start to build paths to your business, other similar shops will notice and may also want to build paths to your store, and pretty soon these paths become roads and these roads turn into highways that transport a large quantity of customers to your business who want to buy your services.
So now that you have a better picture of the importance of getting links to your website from credible sources, it’s time to evaluate your Link Building Strategy. Link building is one of the most laborious and time-consuming tasks involved in SEO. Building these roads is no simple job, but as you’ve seen, it is absolutely worth the effort. In order to get good links, your site must offer good content that other sites want to link to. Below are some easy tips for generating quality, linkable content.
• Create Lists – Organizing your content into a list format helps keep your points clear, making your content more readable and attractive to the user as opposed to a long page full of text. The truth is, people surfing the web tend to skim rather than actually read everything. For instance titles like “10 Tips for Catering a Halloween Party” or “5 Questions to Ask Your Caterer” make for good resources that are more likely to get linked to.
• Add Humor – You don’t have to be a comedian, but try to spice up your content a little, make it interesting and fun while still informative. Writing with a bit of humor is a great way to attract links, tweets and digs to your content.
• Answer a Question – What questions are the people in your niche typically seeking answers to? What questions do you find your clients ask the most frequently? Become a resource for the most sought after searches, i.e. write a post about how soon the search for a caterer should start or perhaps an article that talks about the typical costs for certain catering services.
• Include Options for Sharing – If you want your content to be easily found and shared, make it simple for users by adding social sharing buttons that allow readers to easily tweet, email and share your content via social bookmarking sites. This may sound like common sense, but many people overlook it.
• Write Clearly and Accurately – To get your content linked to, it is important that it is written clearly with no spelling or grammatical errors. This will give your article an improved chance of being linked to by authoritative sites. Proofread your work and have others look over it before submitting. A good method to check your work is reading your content out loud, this helps you catch any awkward phrasing or repetitions.
Writing original, quality content is ultimately what will attract readers to your site. No matter what you’re writing about, get creative and generate something compelling that will incite users to click on and share your link. This is one of the best ways to position your site as an authority website and get people to link to the pages you want to rank well.
