Links, links – we all want them.  Some of us hire external help to get them; others of us are constantly on a hot pursuit for cultivating them ourselves; and some of us just try to make amazing content and hope that they will come.

But links are not a game of quantity, but rather a game of quality.  How can you tell if a link is really valuable?  Here’s an 10-point cheat sheet to see if your inbound link passes the sniff test.   Each of these criteria has its own merit, but the combination of them should give you pretty good insight into the links that are giving your page the most juice.

Evaluating the link itself:

1)      Anchor text relevancy:  Is the anchor text of the link relevant to the keywords and theme of your page?  And beyond the anchor text – how about the content on the linking page that surrounds the anchor text – is that relevant as well?

2)      Anchor text variety:   A caveat to number one  is that all the anchor text of the links coming to your page should not be identical, but should have a wide variety.  It’s completely ok if some of them don’t include your keywords at all and are more generic.  Having too much of the same, indicates there might be foul play at hand.

3)      Authenticity of the link:  If you can place links on the page yourself, or it’s just a random link stuffed at the bottom of the page, it won’t be adding much value to you.  But if it’s clear that someone put the link there because your webpage offers valuable, related content, then it will count for much more.

Evaluating the linking site:

4)      Relevancy of the site’s url:  If the linking site’s url is strongly related to your keywords this is a big bonus.

5)      Relevancy of the website’s content:  Is the content on the linking page valuable, unique and relevant to the keyword theme of your page.  Industry-themed sites can often offer a large value to your page.

6)      Site’s rank for your target keywords:  Does the linking site rank well for the keywords you are targeting.

7)      Uniqueness of the site:  Does the linking site offer some unique, valuable content that is related to your keyword theme.

8)      Age of the linking site:  Has the linking site been around for more than a couple of years?

9)      Page rank of the linking site:  Is the page rank of the linking site and that linking age at least reasonable?

10)   Number of outbound links:  Are you a prominent related mention on the page, or just part of a massive unrelated list?

(1: Create a catchy title that will entice people to read your post.)

All I ever needed to know about great content, I learned at the movies.  These learnings can be distilled down into seven keys (hidden throughout this fantastic post!) (2: Keep the reader in active anticipation of what’s coming next.)

Upon reading his daily Google Analytics report, the internet marketing manager took his iPhone and, in a complete rage, threw it at his whiteboard.  He had tried everything and this was the end of the road for him.  (3: Grab attention so your audience will read on.)

According to analysts, 46.5 percent of all internet marketing managers were in complete and utter agony that month due to unprofitable pay-per-click campaigns. (4: Share some previously unknown, valuable data to emphasize significance.)

All these marketing managers have one thing in common: their hopes and dreams of overnight internet success were quashed by websites that seemed to care about giving visitors a good bounce more than taking their money.  (5: Enable the reader to relate to you and your story.)

How could he go on? As he paced around, he plotted one last course of action, knowing the boss would soon likely pull the plug on his campaign and show him the door.  Aha – he had the answer!  Forget this PPC, CTR, CPC stuff: social media marketing is all the rage these days.  He would start a viral marketing campaign using a chain letter!  That was sure to get the dollars pumping into the site!   (6: A little humor never hurts.)

He patched the hole in his whiteboard, gave his iPhone an apology kiss and set off to work.  In the world of online marketing, there is no such thing as giving up.  There are so many different options to try, you just need to keep testing new channels and messaging until you strike a balance that brings you the results you desire.  It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you are actively engaged in learning from them. (7: Motivate change or action; move your audience to think differently.)

We hope you are able to use all seven of these “hidden” keys to get two thumbs up (and a ton of links) from your readers.  It may take some time to regularly produce amazing content, so until your articles are getting a proliferation of “Likes” on Facebook or re-tweets via Twitter or multiple links from many blogs, be thankful there is no way for readers to throw rotten tomatoes online!  With practice, you’ll get there.

One of the best ways to ensure your website ranks well for your most important keywords in natural search results is through in-bound links to your site.  But how do you attract them (short of begging other website owners to link to you)?  We’ve got some tips and tricks below that will help you build links to your website.

Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about links, link juice and the social etiquette of linking:

First, not all links are created equal.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all evaluate links to your website relative to the quality of the source of the link.  So, for instance, if you get a link from The New York Times it’s vastly more important to the search engines than if Yield Software links to you (we hope one day soon we’ll be in the same league!)  In practical terms, what this means is that the NYT link has more juice than the Yield link, and when the algorithm is determining what your page rank should be, it’s weighing the link juice of each individual link.  Other types of sites that provide powerful link juice are links from .gov sites and links from .edu sites, in addition to links from mainstream media source sites or very popular blogs such as BoingBoing or ReadWriteWeb.

Second, link unto others as you would have the link to you.  If you hope to generate lots of great links to your site, you must also be someone who sensibly links regularly.  The social etiquette of the Web dictates that website and blog owners conscientiously link to the sources of news, information, reference material or other sources of content; this, in turn, will inspire web publishers to link to you.  By declaring you’re a good netizen, people will want to engage you more.

Now, on to those recommendations!

“Top” Lists

One of the all-time best ways to get people to link to your content is through lists.  For instance, the top 10 best ways to evaluate a purchase.  Or three things to consider when making a purchasing.  Remember that your “Top” lists should have some relevance to what your site is all about, but SHOULD NOT be an overt promotion of or commercial about your products and services.  These should be objectively helpful lists that people would intuitive want to share with friends or colleagues or family members (for instance, in their own blogs or via a tweet on Twitter or in a post on Facebook.)

Video

After social networks, like Facebook, video is the hottest segment of the Web.  People can’t get enough of video!  So a good way to get people to link to your site or your blog is use video.  It’s super easy to embed a video in your site (especially if you’re publishing your website or blog on a content management system like WordPress).  As with “Top” lists, be sure to choose videos that relevant to what you do, sell or serve.  If you produce and publish your own videos (which you should!), again, make sure you’re doing something that is going to be useful to people.  How-to videos are hugely popular on the Web, particularly if it’s about something emerging that people want to do but don’t yet understand.

Photos

Believe it or not, photos are still very popular and capture people’s eye.  Photos that capture an amazing moment, or are somehow instructional in nature can always drive interest, links and traffic to your site.

Downloadable Content

Publish content on your site that is new, unique or unlike something folks can get elsewhere.  Perhaps it’s a how-to guide relating to your industry or the services you provide.  If you have the budget, commission a white paper or a study on some important aspect of the work you do.  Or maybe you’ve been doing a great job with your blog over the last few years and have a collection of blog posts that, when taken together, make a terrific e-book on a subject relating to your business or work.  There are a whole number of online e-book publishing sites that enable fast and easy production, and which you can then offer for free download on your site.  It’s easy to say, “oh, no one cares as much as I do about the thing I do” — but guess what: you’re NOT that unique!  If you love what you do, chances are there are a whole bunch of people (potentially tens of thousands, even) who share your interests and passion.

Graphs and Graphics

Another great, link-worthy strategy for your website and blog is the use of graphs and graphics.  From simple charts and graphs created by Excel to timeline graphics, tag cloud graphics and workflow illustrations, folks love great visuals that bring into specific relief that which may be difficult to imagine.  There are many free or low-cost graphic creation tools across the Web (do a search!) that enable you to simply plug in a number of data points and return a beautiful illustration that you can copy and publish.  If you have a little budget, you can also always hire graphic artists to create stunning visualizations of either data or workflow or technology stacks (among many other options.)

At the end of the day, content, even in the 21st century, is still king.  If you consistently publish good stuff on your website and blog, it will be link-worthy.  And when you do publish, don’t be shy about publicizing that fact.  You should copy the URL of your new content and paste it into tweets on Twitter, your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn updates and any other sites where you can provide updates of what you’re working on.

Once you’ve gotten into a rhythm, be sure to see how your site is ranking for your keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you’re a Yield Software customer, you can do this quickly and conveniently by clicking on the Natural Search tab in the Yield Web Marketing Suite and checking your link counts.  You’ll also be able to see the sources of those links so you can evaluate how well you’re doing in terms of link juice / link source quality.

(That Would Be: Link Analysis Made Easy)

Yield Software is proud to introduce Link Analysis Made Easy (LAME).

I know, I know: you’re thinking “is that really the best way to brand your new technology??” But rest assured: LAME is so NOT lame.

LAME makes it much easier to determine which of your inbound links are passing the all-important “Link Juice” to your web pages.  Let’s step back though.  What is Link Juice? Link Juice (we also call it link love) is the concept that a link to your Web page from a quality web page on a trusted site can pass some of its goodness to your Web page.  Why are inbound links important?  Inbound links are the key to raising your natural search rank because Google, Yahoo! and Bing each look at links to your site to judge how popular it is and, therefore, what sort of ranking it should get in results pages.  Links from quality sites (i.e. NYTimes.com) have more juice than links from inconsequential sites (i.e., YourNeighborsTotallyOutOfDateBlog.com), so the more high-quality links to your site, the higher your ranking in search engine results.

But how do you know which links to your page are helping you the most?  You could go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and do a search for inbound links to the page.  Then you could navigate to each of those pages and make a note of their Google PageRank using the Google toolbar add-on for Firefox.  And then you could View Source to find your link in the raw HTML and pull out the Anchor Text.  You could also make note of whether that link has a “NoFollow” attribute.  Then count the outbound links on the page to see how many links are competing for link juice.  But doing all that is exhausting!

Is there a better way?  Of course there is, and it is LAME.

For a given Web page on your site, Yield Software’s LAME technology will take periodic snapshots of the inbound links to that page, and will track which links are new or retired.  Actually, we’ve had that functionality for a while.  What’s new is that the “Link Juice” column shows you which links we think are passing you “Link Juice” based a series of analyses.

The actual algorithms used by the search engines to calculate link value are well-guarded secrets, but there is widespread agreement in the SEO community on certain key factors in the link value calculation.  We’ve created several analyses that we use on each in-bound link.  You can see the results in the “Details” page.

Using the information that we’ve gathered about your link, we perform analyses to see how much potential Link Juice the link has, and what factors are helping or hindering its value.

So why should you care about all this?  If you want to begin impacting your page rank for each of your most important keywords, you now have an efficient way to see where you’re at today, and the sorts of improvements you’re able to generate through a sustained link-building campaign.  Now that you have an easy way to gauge link value, you are ready to start link building!  For tips and strategies around executing a good link-building campaign, check out our many blog posts on SEO and building in-bound links.

In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your website, newsletter, and any other place folks interact with your business

- Also promote your Page on invoices, receipts, business cards, etc. — just something simple will do.

- Become a fan of partner and other local businesses

Once your Page is set up and you’ve begun promoting it, be sure to consistently post content…

About your business, including events, rates,  successes, customer wins, new partners, photos and videos of offerings, links to your blog postings, etc.  If your business sponsors things like the local Little League or the Breast Cancer 3-Day, be sure to highlight that.

About your industry, including links to news articles, blog postings, videos, events and happenings – and your review of them.

About local stuff, including local events and happenings (i.e. the 4th of July Parade), what’s coming up, photos and videos of them, your summary of how they went, etc.

About products or services used before, in conjunction with or after yours, including news article links and links to blog postings, videos, reviews, photos, customer comments and the like.

Also encourage content submission from your Fans, such as…

Q&A with past, upcoming or potential customers.

Customer testimonials describing how great you or your products and services are.

Customer photos or videos of them using your product.

Polls of fans, where you post an open-ended question that encourages engagement and responses

Once your community on Facebook is thriving, always be responsive!  Be active in your community.  Respond to comments and popular items.  Be interactive by using “liking” (the “thumbs-up” feature) and commenting on posts from active community members.

Create a Twitter account for your business if you haven’t already.  Simply go to twitter.com and click the “sign up now” button on their homepage.  A wizard will guide you through getting the account set-up.  When getting set up, enter your own name as the account owner, but use your business name as the Twitter ID (or handle).  So, if your business name is Cookie’s Cupcakes, your Twitter handle could be @CookiesCupcakes or @Cookies-Cupcakes or @Cookies_Cupcakes.  If someone already has claimed your business name (it happens a lot), try adding your local telephone area code to the end of your business name (@CookiesCupcakes415 — which indicates it’s the Cookie’s Cupcakes in San Francisco… BTW: if there’s an actual business out there with this name, our choice of it is purely coincidental!)

If you have a blog on your company website (and you should!), grab a Twitter widget for your blog so your Twitter stream can be highlighted in the sidebar.  Most website developers know how to do this, so ask for help if you need it.

Next up: Get followers!

First, follow Twitter’s suggestions for uploading an address book to see who you already know on Twitter.  You’d be surprised just how many people you already know also have Twitter accounts; once Twitter has revealed these folks, follow them.  In most instances, they’ll follow you back.

Second, use some of the same techniques for acquiring followers as you did with your Facebook page.

Third, follow Twitter accounts who post content related to your business, accounts of partners and accounts of your followers.

Fourth, promote your @UserName handle the same way you would an 800 number, your fax number or your main business number — including your website, business cards, shopping bags, collateral material, promotions and the like.

Once the basic blocking and tackling is done, you should start posting content:

Link Twitter to your mobile or smart phone (follow the instructions on Twitter).  This enables you to quickly and efficiently send tweets out over Twitter on the fly.  If you link your Twitter account to your Facebook Page, anything you tweet via Twitter will also show up as new content on your Facebook Page (thereby killing two birds with one stone … er … feeding two birds with one seed … well, you get the picture.)

Tweet early, tweet often! Tweet “Just opened the store and there were customers already waiting to get in!”  Or “The Little League team we sponsor just won their game.  Woo Hoo!”  Or “Just posted about a new offer that I’m really excited about” and then include the URL of the blog post people should go see.

Don’t worry, be happy. Remember that whatever you tweet can’t be retracted, so stay positive.  Also, don’t worry too much if you don’t get things exactly right in the early days — you’ll to learn how people use Twitter and what the conventional uses of the medium are soon enough.

If you haven’t already, create a YouTube channel.  Simply go to YouTube.com and follow the instruction on the homepage for creating your own channel.

Once your account is created, post videos of product tours, videos of your products in use, tours of your store (if you have one), and the like. Also, post videos of local and industry events.  Another great way to use YouTube is by posting customer testimonial videos.  Encourage customers to take their own videos.  If you use one of the popular, low-cost Flip video cameras (also available in HD), it allows you to automatically upload videos you record to your YouTube channel simply by plugging it into your computer or laptop.  If you use a Macintosh computer or MacBook laptop, use the included video editing software to jazz-up your videos with titles, music and transitions (if you have kids, this can be a great project for them and they often figure out how to do it far faster than their parents!)

Put links to join your YouTube channel on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And remember it’s easy to embed video in your blog posts.  Be responsive to all comments on your videos. And be sure to promote new video posting through Facebook and Twitter.

If you haven’t already, create a Flickr account.  Post photos of you, your products, your staff, pictures of your products in use, and pictures of products used before and after yours (the idea is to show how they fit with yours or what the end result is.)  Post photos of local and industry events.  As you upload photos, be sure you name them and add tags (they’re like categories) so they can be easily found in searches (for instance, if someone on Flickr is doing a search on “cupcakes” you want Cookie’s Cupcakes to show up in search results, so be sure to name the kind of cupcake you’ve photographed — red velvet, for instance — and tag the photo “cupcake, red velvet”.

Incorporate your Flickr photostream onto your website or blog page.  Include links to follow you on Flickr on your website, newsletter and other touch points.  And be sure to promote all your new photo content through Facebook and Twitter.

Give your own website a social focus. For instance — and this one’s important — start a blog.  And make sure it’s incorporated INTO your website and not part of a blog hosting website with a different domain name than your website’s.  Most website developers know how to do this and can help you to get set up.  Also, you can decide to build your business’s website on a blog hosting platform such as WordPress, which makes incorporating a blog so much easier.  There are many free and low-cost business website templates you can use on WordPress, and there are many website developers who can help you get up and going at a reasonable cost.

Once your blog is up and going, be sure to regularly post to your blog, including product reviews, industry events and news, and  local events and news.  What are questions you get from customers or what issues do they frequently run in to?  Use your blog to address these. Feature videos from your YouTube channel and when you post, insert photos from your Flickr stream — it’s easy to do both and really gives your blog professional flare.

Be sure you also add an RSS feed to your blog — again, WordPress makes this easy and a website development professional can also make this happen for you.  Promote all your blog posts via Facebook and Twitter.  You can use free applications like TweetDeck or Seesmic to make this simple and efficient for you.

Make sure you’ve established a presence for yourself on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, FourSquare and other social / crowd-sourced sites.  Remember that these sites enable your customers to not only find you — as they once did with the Yellow Pages — but to also rate your product or service quality, customer service, responsiveness, and the like.  Such sites can drive a great deal of traffic to your business, but can also kill traffic if lots of people indicate they didn’t appreciate their experience with your company.  Most companies don’t have anything to worry about — it’s only those companies who fail their customers that get into trouble.

Email out a newsletter to everyone on your email list.  Setting up an email newsletter is easy using services like Constant Contact or MailChimp — they include really nice templates you can customize with your own branding and help you to manage all your email lists.  And there’s no need to write something from scratch; simply repurpose content you’ve already developed and published on your blog – and include links to popular videos, photos and tweets from other Twitter users that people have found of interest.  Make sure there are plenty of links in your email newsletter back to relevant sections of you website.

Sign up for Google Alerts and set alerts for your business name and any competitors you may have.  You may also want to set one up for your own name if it is used a lot in conjunction with your business.  Google Alerts tells you when you are mentioned in the news, in people’s blog posts or tweets and and enables you to respond to both positive and negative reviews or comments.

Always send a kind word to someone who speaks of you favorably.

For negative reviews or posts, reach out the poster to learn more and find out how you can improve in the future.  (Be sure to do this non-defensively and without anger.  This is an opportunity to learn from a customer and to grow from negative feedback.  Getting into disagreements or fights with customers — particularly online — can lead to much larger negative consequences.)

It will very likely take some effort to build all this up.  It might seem awkward at first and feel a bit time-consuming.  So take it one step at a time.

Go slow and don’t worry if you feel like you are talking into a black hole for awhile.  Continue brainstorming on that rewards system to get an active community in place.

Once you get into the habit of these forms of communication, it will become second nature and the community that you develop will be rewarding to you professionally and to your bottom line.

Next Up — Part 3:  Social Media Examples That Work

In Part One of this post, I gave you five tips for building inbound links to your site. In this post, you’ll find four more proven ways to develop high-quality links that can improve page rank in natural search results for your site.

Tip # 5: Get quoted – Seeing your company name (and a link back to your site) in a publication such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is fabulous, of course – as is the resulting link juice from such authoritative sites.

Getting quoted in these publications is not so easy. (One thing you can do to help the media contact you is to ensure your press room is up-to-date and that it includes a contact name and number for journalists who are on a deadline. One small business we know got quoted in a story for Forbes.com simply because she answered her phone and was able to give a quick 10-minute interview.)

However, hundreds (if not thousands) of lesser-known media outlets exist – including companies that publish newsletters for their clients, trade publications, and even your own local newspaper.

These publications often need source experts. One way to find them is through a PR service such as HARO (Helping a Reporter Out).  Once you subscribe to HARO, you’ll then receive queries from reporters looking for sources. (The free HARO list comes via email three times a day).  You can also pitch yourself (or if you’re a marketer, pitch your CEO) to trade publication editors / reporters, newsletter publishers, etc. Sometimes you’ll hit gold and other times you’ll be completely ignored, so it pays to pitch publications on a regular basis.

Tip # 6: Get creative about .gov and .edu links – Google gives higher consideration to links from .gov and .edu links because they are so hard to get. However, you can get them if you think “outside the box”:

For instance: If your R&D team is partnering with a university on a project, see if you can do reciprocal links to the project you’re working on.

For instance: Some states let you register your business online – and in doing so, you create a high-value link from a .gov site.

For instance: If your CEO is semi-famous within your industry or he/she graduated from a local university or business program, be sure to send press releases to the person’s alma mater. Sometimes the specific departments (i.e., the business school) will reprint news releases online if they concern a graduate.

Tip #7: Get listed in directories – This is one tactic you have to be a little careful with because you don’t want to fall victim to email scammers who claim they’ll list you in thousands of directories for a low price of $99.95.  Do a simple search using “industry keyword + directory” (so, if you’re a wedding planner, type into a Google or Bing search box “wedding planner directory”) to see which directories exist that relate to your work. Then, get listed in those. (Their are dozens of directories for wedding planners, for example.)

If the directory charges an annual fee, be sure to track your traffic from the directory over the year. If it sends little or no traffic your way, you don’t want to pay the fee when it comes up for renewal.

You’ll also want to ensure your website is listed with Yahoo’s directory (annual fee is $299), as well as DMOZ because Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing considers both of these directories important since each listing is reviewed and approved by a human.

Remember, links are an important element of your search engine optimization (SEO) and Web marketing strategy. To learn more, get your copy of our free e-book, The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small & Growing Businesses. This is a 70-page e-book that explains everything from Web marketing and social media to PPC and SEO.

Debra Mastaler, author of the Link Spiel blog, recently wrote that after she gives presentations about link building, someone inevitably approaches her to say something along the lines of: “Come on, what are the ‘insider secrets’ to building links? Everyone already knows those you talked about.”

Never mind the fact that, as she says, she just spent 45 minutes “sharing how [her team] use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.”

I had the opportunity to attend Debra’s link-building presentation at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose a couple of weeks ago, and she’s right: she gives you the basic methods for building links – as well as some really creative methods even I hadn’t considered.

As Debra states, “The easy part of link building is knowing that you need them. The hard part is influencing the right people to give them to you.” Herewith, then, are of some of Debra’s tips – which (coincidentally) are some of ours here at Yield Software – for doing just that.

First: Ask people to link to your content. According to Debra, many sites actually do have lots of great content but business owners and marketers don’t ask people to link to it.

If you have an article or newsletter archive or a resource library of white papers and case studies, add copy to that particular Web page that tells people to link to your content. It’s that easy.

In a similar fashion, you can also let people know your articles are available for reprint. Be sure to explain how to handle attribution as well as the anchor text and URL people should use to link back to your site.

Using the correct URL is important as you don’t want some links going to http://yourdomain.com and others going to http://www.yourdomain.com. This dilutes your link flow.

Along the lines of asking people to link to your content, this is one reason why it’s really important to build relationships with bloggers. Once you create an e-book, report, white paper, etc., you can then ask your blogger friends to write about your content (and link back to it) – saving you from having to pitch them as an unknown person and being ignored.

Second: Give people an incentive to link. In the same way that you give people a freebie for subscribing to your newsletter, give people something for adding a link back to your site. It can be a free t-shirt, a report or other item that has perceived “high-value.” (Remember, everyone loves free stuff!)

Be sure to add copy to your site that you’re offering something of value in exchange for a high-quality link.

Third: Develop “linkable” content. This is one of those basic strategies that only a few companies use to its full extent. Linkable content is stuff on your site that people see has having intrinsic value to others, and as such many people voluntarily promote with a link to that content through tweets on Twitter or in blog posts. Such content most particularly includes useful tools, such as HubSpot’s Twitter Grader or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which finds broken links. (Do a Google or Bing search on “xenu link sleuth” to see how effective this tactic is!)

Once you have a great tool that everyone wants to use, send out a press release and contact those bloggers who are now your friends. Tweet about your tool as well. In a relatively short time, you can build anywhere from a six to a couple dozen quality inbound links.

Fourth: Comment on blogs. Yes, blogs generally use the “no follow” attribute with regard to links (“no follow” tells the search engine spider not to follow the link and hence the link doesn’t help with SEO ranking).  However, commenting on blogs is still a worthwhile endeavor – especially if you take the time to write a pithy, insightful comment.

Commenting means you must include a website URL as this turns your name into a hyperlink. People reading your comment will then click through to your site.  Instead of sending people to your home page, however, send them to your newsletter sign-up page or the landing page for your latest e-book or free tool. You’ll definitely see a rise in conversion rates – and additional links to your page / site as people find your linkable content.

In Part Two, I’ll cover how to build links by getting quoted in the media; how to get those elusive .gov and .edu links; and getting listed in directories.

To learn more about why linking is so important, be sure to download your free copy of Yield Software’s new e-book: The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small & Growing Businesses. You’ll learn how to build and market your website as well as use SEO, PPC and landing page optimize to increase leads and sales.