Backlinks Blogs
Backlinks Blogs
Exploiting Backlink Exchanges to Promote Accountant Websites
By now you’ve heard the expression “backlinks”. Backlinks are the links around the net that point to your site and they are vital to your website’s search marketing push. Backlinks are a vital metric taken advantage of by search engines like Google. These search engines consider links to be a measure of a site’s comparative importance and bank heavily on them when establishing the position of most important accountant websites in search engine results.
After you get your site up you may notice a serious increase in emails and requests from other businesses, many of which you never heard of before, wanting to exchange links with you.
Back in the old days we used to use a technique called “link swapping”.
Suppose I was an accountant in Naples, Florida and you had a firm in key west. I put a link to your website on my links page, you put one on yours pointing back. We both get a boost in the search engines.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work any more, but there are ways to get around this restriction by using blogs. For this to work the blogs need to have “unique URLs”. This means the blog can’t be hosted on the same domain as the website it’s promoting. With most free blog sites like Google Blogger, Tumblr, and Live Journal this is the case by default. The trick is to ling to each others websites from our blogs thus making the links less reciprocal. Of course if you don’t have a blog, or if your blog is hosted directly on your domain you’ll need some other solution. You’ll need some other web property to link from or you’ll be giving out much more valuable links than you’re getting.
It may seem like a win-win situation where you both receive SEO benefits, but there are several factors your must consider before accepting.
1) Who are your new partners?
Always look over the company’s site and do some research on them before you agree to anything. Keep in mind that people are going to see and even follow these links so it’s important to make sure you’re not linking to “bad neighbors”.
If you provide a link on your site to another company’s website, people on your site will assume that you endorse them and vouch for their business. People will hold you responsible for this endorsement. If you’re linking with spammers and scammers the damage to your reputation won’t justify any SEO benefit your accountant websites might enjoy. Proceed with caution. Don’t link to any partners you have doubts about.
2) Not all links are created equal.
Other accountant websites offer the best links. Links from other types of firms still have value, especially if they’re in your market, but they won’t look very relevant to you.
Some companies have very specific instructions on where they want you to put the link and how it should be set-up. Sometimes they’ll insist that you put their link on a certain page. Some will insist that you link from your main site, even your home page or other high-traffic page. Obviously these would be very high value links. The question is, what are they offering in exchange?
Many of these sites are scammers. Try to find the page where they’ll be putting your links. More often than not, you will see a page buried deep in their site, hidden behind many vague page and link titles. This is a completely lopsided trade. They’re getting a high quality link from a respected accountant and you’re getting an obscure link from a spam site that doesn’t offer you any real SEO or traffic value. Other sites will give you a great link for a month or two, then they’ll quietly move or remove it after a month or two and hope you don’t notice.
3) Discretion is the better part of valor.
Google, the largest and most popular search engine out there, created the PageRank system to accurately gauge the popularity of websites. They are sincerely trying to provide the best possible search results to their users, and they work very hard and spend a lot of money to achieve this goal. They DON’T like it when people try to game the system. Website groups that try to build up huge masses of backlinks to each other for no reason but to increase SEO benefit (aka link farms) often earn Google’s wrath and can easily be blacklisted from PageRank, negating the effect of backlinks altogether.
I’m not saying all offers to exchange links are bad. I’m simply advising caution. Promoting accountant websites is difficult, and you have to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. But you also have to preserve a unclouded mindset and think critically before committing your firm’s good name to any new link partners. The best means to staying out of trouble is to think of your links as endorsements for good goods and services instead of search engine optimization shortcuts. If you ever catch yourself swapping links only for the search engine optimization value stop and take a genuine unbiased look at the company you’re endorsing and ask yourself, “Am I genuinely prepared to be responsible for my friends and clients doing business with the owner of this site?”