Cross Linking for Your Online Marketing Plan

In our last post we talked about anchor linking within your own webpage. Now once small business owners have that down, cross linking is the next step. Search engine algorithms love it when there are links to your website throughout the web. Cross linking is a lot more difficult than anchor linking because it involves more than just your own webpage. It will take much more time, but the effort is well worth it. You want links to your page on as many different websites as possible. Cross linking is an essential part of your small business's online marketing plan. There are ways that you can begin to cross link on your own. The first step is to list your website on all your social media applications including facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, Yelp, your blog, and in all directories. There is a section in the profile section where you can list a link to your small business's website. Additionally, when you comment on other people's posts on facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. you can include a link to your webpage. However when you do this you need to be careful and ensure your posts are more than just an "advertisement" for your own business. You need to contribute relevant information to the discussion. If your post is nothing but a link, search engines will not look fondly upon it and the authors can even block you from further posts. Another way to cross link is to to comment on blogs that are relevant to your industry. For example, I like to follow blogs online that relate to online marketing plans for small businesses and social media. Within the comment, I refer users to my own website where I provide more information about online marketing. This helps your rankings on search engines. It might take you a lot of time and probably a couple of months to start seeing results, but once you do you are sure to see your search rankings improve. Once you begin to be known in the online community you can also network with others in your industry to trade links. They put a link to your page on their website, you put one to their website on yours. You want to be careful though when you do this because if you have a link to a website that is not relevant to your industry, or that has poor rankings, then it will hurt you rather than help you. Contact Us to discuss this further or post here to let me know what you think!