…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis, an early blogger, internet enthusiast, and journalism professor, and promulgated by successive Web entrepreneurs. Understanding how this economy works and why even small businesses should care is critical to finding success online, and how companies of all sizes market themselves in a neighborhood that is both intimately local and truly global.

Link Economy – The Basics

When speaking and blogging about the link economy, Jarvis and others, such as Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post blog, speak mainly in terms of journalism and its myriad transformations since the turn of the millennium. But the link economy is much larger than the news profession and encompasses anyone with a website or who seeks to make money on the Web.

So what is it?

Let’s go back to the beginning – briefly – so you have some context.  When Google set about indexing the entirety of the Web, it needed to create complex sets of rules for gathering and presenting all that information. In the same way the Dewey Decimal System made it possible for librarians to organize vast numbers of books such that library patrons – browsers – could easily locate them, Google built (and continues to refine) a search algorithm that makes it possible for you to quickly seek and find just what you might be looking for.

Google’s algorithm (which has been lately joined by the Yahoo! Search and Bing algorithms, among others) considers a number of important factors to determine how to present search results to you. For instance, it looks at the words you type into the search box to see how these individual words or phrases match the words or phrases contained in the vast amounts of information it has indexed.

But because potentially billions of pages of content exist that may contain the exact words or phrase you’ve entered into that little search box, Google also considers things like:

> How many times a site has been visited;
> How long other visitors to the site have stayed after clicking on a link to it;
> The number of links FROM that site to other sites;
> The number of links TO that site originating from other sites, particularly sites that themselves enjoy many in-bound and out-bound links; and
> Many other variables, some of which are rather complex.

When added together, these factors determine the rank any one website will have for any given search query.  And most website owners really, really want to be the number one result on the first page of results for the queries they care about most.  Which is why it’s so valuable to understand how to get there.

Give Link Love, Get Link Love

From among these variables, the links, in particular, have a very powerful impact on where your website will rank in search engine results.  Why? Because Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing each believe that links to your site from other sites indicate that others believe your site has value. And when the search engines see that your site links to others that you believe have value?  You get points for that, too.  Some call it link juice.  I prefer the term Link Love.

Many folks approach the concept of Link Love quite casually. They do so, however, at their own peril. Mastering the art of Link Love can seem confusing – daunting, even – but there are very real rewards for putting in the effort to get it right.

Link Love is a lot like when love is expressed between two people: to actually mean something it has to be the real deal. It’s one thing to toss off the words “I love you” and to seal the deal with a peck on the cheek.  It’s quite another to look into someone’s eyes, say “I love you” like you really mean it, and follow it up with a long, deep, lingering kiss on the lips.

In other words, it’s easy to link to lots of websites – to say “I love you” to every poor slob who walks by – but it’s harder to link to specific portions of a site that lends context to your own content.  It means you necessarily limit your outbound links to those sites that really do mean something to you.  The crawlers, believe it or not, pay attention to these nuances.  Indiscriminately toss out the I Love You’s, and you’ll get the wrong kind of notice. Make your I Love You’s mean something – well, that earns you respect.

It means your I Love You’s are the real deal.

Similarly, if you have credible, completely original or authoritative content within your own website, others will find it compelling; they’ll link to that content; and they’ll confer their own Link Love on your site.  For instance, if you sell curbside mailboxes – and you’re absolutely passionate about the interesting, inventive, totally creative mailboxes you feature – make sure you’re adequately expressing that passion through great writing, terrific photos and compelling videos.  Over time, folks from other sites will take notice of that passion and link to it for one reason or another. And those links will begin to add up.

As Jarvis cleverly puts it: “Link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff.”

All You Need Is Love. Almost.

Virtually every website on the Web is “crawled” by Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing and others so that the pages in it can be indexed by their search engines.  If you want your website to appear in search results when someone uses words or a phrase pertaining to your goods or services (or reporting or blog), you’ve got to be sure you have a website that is:

> Easily found;
> Can be easily crawled and understood by the search engine crawlers;
> Credible; and
> Authoritative.

The first two have to do with how well you’ve built your website, including where and how it’s hosted, and whether or not you do a good job creating each page in your website, which includes things like page titles (or Title tags) that only the crawlers can see.

Credibility and authority are established by examining your Link Love – by considering all the factors I discuss above.  It’s a key reason why the link economy came into being.  But it’s also important to remember that Link Love is the primary means of moving traffic around the Web efficiently and effectively, which is the other key reason the link economy exists today.

Think about it: those search engine results are nothing more than a collection of headlines, a little text and – most importantly – links.  Once clicked on, those links carry you instantly to a place of potential interest to you.  Similarly, links in news articles, blog posts, websites, display advertisements, text ads, tweets from Twitter, and news items in Facebook and LinkedIn all do the same thing: they move you from one specific place to another, allowing you to follow a line of thought or inquiry to whatever conclusion you might seek.

Conclusions like the discovery of breaking news. Source material. Education. Entertainment. Business connections.

Conclusions such as purchases.

For websites that seek to generate revenue of one kind or another, understanding and embracing the link economy isn’t just essential – it’s a matter of life or death.  Jarvis outlines four essential rules for the Link Economy, which were originally written to specifically address the field of journalism and publishing, but which are relevant in this context:

First: All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links…

Second: The recipient of links is the party responsible for monetizing the audience they bring… When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it.

Third: Links are a key to efficiency. In other words: Do what you do best and link to the rest…

Fourth: There are opportunities to add value atop the link layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity…

All of which could be summarized as:

Be open to links, but remember links giveth and links taketh away; what you do with what you’ve been given before it (we) leaves is completely within your power.

One of the great “old school” newsmen, Charlie Rose, recently interviewed the namesake of “new school” blog The Huffington Post and the head of the once-mighty Associated Press (AP), which is adamantly resisting the forces of the Link Economy. It was a spirited debate in which Arianna Huffington asserted the overwhelming evidence of the link economy working.  At the end, Rose offered this conclusion:

“We have seen the future and it is here. It is a linked economy. It is search engines. It is online advertising. That’s where the future is. And if you can’t find your way to that, then you can’t find your way.”

Welcome to the future.