Your linking campaign walks hand in hand with Public Relations.

Definition of Public Relations:

1. the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.
   
   
2. the art, technique, or profession of promoting such goodwill.

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006. www.dictionary.com

A strong linking campaign supports any public relations campaign you may have in place. It also, in and of itself, becomes a PR campaign.

Link building strategies give you an increasing platform from which to communicate and sell/share/promote all aspects of your business.

Within each linking campaign, you may have several goals. For example, you may want to increase a product or brands publicity in traditional media outlets. Or you may want to quickly increase product sales, grow your list on a particular theme or topic, and/or establish expert status, etc.  As you move through this course you will be planning and choosing your links and matched content with your goals in mind.

Link Building is an effective way for you to step your business out of the crowd and announce yourself as the resource people are looking for.

Your PR efforts are leveraged online via link building as all the major search engines consider the number of inbound links coming to your site in their ranking algorithms.

Your linking efforts compound – not only do your quality links raise your site and site pages higher in the engines; but the places that link to you  (because they are favored sources) also will rank for your contributing content on their sites - in the engines. Giving you traffic and search engine ranking leverage.

Visitors may travel directly to your chosen placement sites for their information - or -they will find you on the search engines via your content/link placements.   This course will focus on engine rankings as a holistic piece of the puzzle.

Google will be our primary guide in how to develop the most effective linking campaign. According to ComScore and Neilson ratings over the past year Google holds 57 to 65% of all US search engine market share in any given month. Yahoo comes in second at 19 to 22% market share.

To give you a monthly view of what this means, ComScores calculated US September 2007 Google search user numbers at  5.3 Billion. This traffic resource deserves front and center focus.

To gain more market share and raise your sites search engine rankings while at the same time increasing your marketing conversion percentages, it is Not the quantity of links that is of primary importance.

At the most elemental level, what matters is that you live in good neighborhoods and stay out of what Google calls “bad neighborhoods”.

Googles job is to deliver the most semantically meaningful response to a query.

“…the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.”

http://www.google.com/corporate/business.html

Obviously using backlink numbers alone would not be a way for them to deliver on their promise. Thus the end of the link farm business. And Google’s inclusion of link farms as “spammers” – (those seeking to artificially raise a site’s search engine presence with unrelated and valueless content for the end users query).

At a very basic level, your site and sites content living in a good neighborhood, means that outside links to your site are present in places that Google deems as a reputable source for that theme query. The landing page is a resource to the searcher for that query. And, that the pages next to the landing page are relevant to the topic as well.

Targeted Traffic

However obtaining high seo rankings is only one part of the power of your themed linking campaign.

When done consciously you will drive highly targeted traffic to your site pages in numerous ways that all ultimately quite naturally, raise and broaden your keyword/phrase presence on the search engines.

By keeping the engines in mind, while focusing on the public relations aspect of themed link building, you have an incredible opportunity to increase conversions by speaking the same language as your prospects.

By choosing your placements you will know more about your prospects topical interests. You will consider where your prospects and visitors are are coming from.

Are your visitors searching a directory or guide or news engines for specific information, products or services thus starting, perhaps, with a more general quest or interest within your broad theme?

Or, perhaps your prospects are frequently arriving on your site from a specific relevantly themed content web site or blog where you have purchased a link.

Or, perhaps your visitor is typing exact keyword phrases in the search engine and arriving on a themed article within your carefully silod website.

Your drive to provide more relevant content around a given theme, to better meet and serve those looking for such content, while gaining internet presence, builds the educational leg of the website success stool. This leg will support themed content that can be leveraged on a third pary site with a similar theme, and your own.

Later in this document, you will find worksheets to strategically plan your links and the content that you will use with them.