Ecommerce Link Building Strategies For 2010

Attract more visitors, customers and revenue to your online store in 2010 with these ecommerce link building strategies for 2010. Leverage your time & content for maximum ROI on your marketing dollars better than ever before.

Recently I attended an SEOmoz Pro Webinar on link building strategies for 2010; focusing on how important link building is for SEO becuase of how much ecommerce stores have to benefit from SEO as part of their marketing mix. Here are some takeaways from the webinar with suggestions on how to apply to your online store.

Before you launch any marketing endeavor, you need to decide the desired outcome you want to achieve so you can set proper goals, create a strategy to meet those goals and then take action to bring your marketing strategy to life. To start, here are five worthy goals that a well planned & executed link building campaign will help you achieve:

1. Spread your brand awareness
2. Increase the individual ranking of a specific page for a specific keyword search
3. Diversify traffic from web properties beyond search engines
4. Increase your website’s ability to rank pages, both new & old
5. Achieve more complete indexation of your existing pages

Resist the temptation to shoot for all five goals at once. Pick one that is the most important to you; list the others in descending order of importance, for future action.

You’re much more likely to succeed and stick to the roadmap if you see progress early. Putting all your focus toward one goal helps you see progress much quicker than if you were to spread your efforts across five projects. Now for a little secret: many of the link building methods I am going to share will help you achieve multiple goals with each action. In essence, you compress the work needed to achieve multiple goals at once with overlapping link building.

Here are 3 methods to achieve each of the goals above.

Spread Brand Awareness

Increasing your brand awareness with SEO requires you to focus on exposure points for your website and brand.To increase brand awareness, go after sites with a high traffic volume, focusing on websites that already attract the people you want to sell to. Use these three simple, daily tasks to start spreading brand awareness:

1. Read & comment on blogs
2. Answer questions in industry forums, groups (LinkedIn Groups) and answer sites (Yahoo Answers)
3. Start using Twitter, don’t promote yourself; instead, promote others with Retweet

Increase Rankings For Specific Pages

Getting your website to show up on the first page or top 3 results in the search engines for a specific keyword search is what most people think of when performing SEO. A definite advantage to this is that you can craft your content & marketing to the customer persona of someone performing that specific search. In order to achieve your desired outcome you will need links from a variety of high quality websites with specific anchor text linking to a specific page.

Here are three link building methods for getting links to rank individual pages for specific keyword searches:

1. Review sites already ranking for that keyword and build a list of domains that link to the site already ranking for the keyword query. Using Linkscape, you can find out exactly how many websites link to the site with that exact anchor text. Go after the links the sites already ranking have obtained.
2. Write an article on a long tail keyword that contains your short tail keyword term, syndicate or license that content to other sites with an attribution link to your site. This gives you complete control over the link and anchor text. Depending on where you syndicate you may or may not be able to control what websites pick up the article.
3. Press Release on a newsworthy topic your company is involved with targeted anchor text. PRWeb allows you to submit a press release and include a link with anchor text you choose for $200. Trust me, that’s a bargain.

Diversify Traffic Beyond Search Engines

While it feels great to see 80%+ of your traffic coming from organic search and anywhere from 75% to 90% of that traffic coming from Google it puts your website traffic at high risk. What happens if you disappear from the Google search results because of something out of your control? Do you really want your business to rely on just Google or any other search engine? Assuming you want continued and lasting success, you should diversify your traffic so that it is coming in from many sources.

Successful investors diversify their portfolio and successful online stores diversify their traffic sources because it leads to increased revenue sources. There are two areas to focus on when diversifying your traffic: sites with large volumes of traffic and sites with highly targeted traffic. Sites that have both are the cream of the crop for you and deserve the most focus.

The same tactics covered above in spreading brand awareness also work for diversifying your traffic. In addition, here are 3 more useful ideas.

1. Tubemogul – Use tubemogul to distribute videos to multiple sites. I don’t care what you sell people are looking for videos to watch about it because the majority of people would rather watch than read. Don’t believe me? Video consumption is up while Newspapers are cutting jobs.
2. Flickr – A Picture is worth a thousand words and you can tie pictures of unrelated things back to your product or service with creativity. Pictures also help show you are a real, living human doing real things in the real world. The “fake” persona immediately disappears.
3. Your Favorite Website – That’s right, on whatever websites you enjoy today for fun start connecting with people and spreading awareness of your website. If you read news, then use something like reddit or digg. If you like randomness use twitter more. In the end, give back to the website you love in an unselfish way and you will find opportunities for exposure open you never thought possible.

Increase Ranking Ability

How cool would it be for your new pages to show up on the first page of the search results within days or hours? Amazon, ESPN and CNN have all accomplished this by generating so many incoming links from so many different websites that the search engines make an assumption that almost anything they publish must be worthy of ranking.

The good news is you don’t have to be a million or billion dollar brand website to accomplish this. You may not be able to take on Amazon for books; however, everything from jewelry to pet supplies to clothes still has room for dominant players in the search results.

The goal to accomplish this is to get a high volume of authoritative sites to link to you consistently over time. A key to success is that once someone knows about you or talks about you; don’t let them forget about you. When you stay “top of mind” the likelihood of getting multiple links over time increases.

Here are some ways to passively get a large number of links from a ton of different sites; there is work upfront but the payoff is ongoing:

1. Create a fun quiz that gives a badge at the end people can share on their blog or profile page on any number of sites. An example might be, “Are You A Redneck Marketer? Take A Quiz To Find Out”. Create 3-5 levels of Redneck Marketer and present based on answers.
2. Create free online training and offer some certification or completion recognition that includes embeddable HTML content (similar to the quiz badge) for people to put on their site, blog or profile.
3. Create a tool to help solve a problem. This could be something people use to make a purchase decision such as a wizard to decide what fits your customer’s needs. Or maybe it helps post purchase with something such as an electrical conversion calculator.

Achieve More Complete Indexation Of Your Site

As your site grows to 100,000 pages and progresses past 1,000,000+ pages you may find it difficult to keep your pages in the search index.

The best way to combat this is to continually get links to your inner pages with a focus on pages you see falling out of the index. You can use both internal linking and external link building to help solve your indexation woes.

1. Link to the pages not getting indexed from pages on your site that are already indexed and get crawled often in Google. You don’t have to use your home page but the page with the link should be within one link click from your home page which makes the page out of the index only two link clicks away. The sooner the link appears on your site page the better because search robots crawl from top to bottom, left to right.
2. Guest blog post on another site and find a way to link directly to the page you want indexed. The great part about this is you get a page on someone else’s site with a very targeted link.
3. Contest Prize – Usually for ecommerce sites specific product pages are the ones that become difficult to keep in the index. Hold a contest focused around the product(s) that you are having trouble keeping indexed. Everywhere you promote the contest include a link to the product page.

Now you have three link building strategies to help you achieve five different link building goals. The most important part of being successful in SEO is taking action immediately and daily. Pick your most important goal from above and perform one of the strategies today.

What tactics have you deployed to achieve your link building goals?