9 Linkbuilding Tips for Ecommerce Websites

Most of the linkbuilding tips on BlogStorm have been focussed
primarily towards linkbait for blogs rather than ecommerce sites and, after an
email from one of our readers, it’s time to redress the balance and
offer some help to webmasters who run ‘real’ websites.

Design

Having a stunning design and investing the time to make your site
usable is very important. It is much easier to attract links to a
website that has a nice design than to try and promote an amateurish
and hard to use website.

Start a directory

This does NOT mean starting a directory of useless links like you see
on a huge number of low quality sites.

By starting a directory I mean building a unique resource of
partners/retailers that are related to your niche. For example a
freezer manufacturer could create a directory of authorised retailers
with links to their websites, location maps and a description of the
store. Create a really top quality resource and companies will email
asking to be included and be more than happy to link to your site in
return.

Some of you might be thinking that this is just a glorified link
exchange program that won’t help your search engine rankings. This
type of link exchange between sites that actually work together
offline is very valuable and, assuming the sites that link to you
haven’t been engaging in mass link exchanges, will help your rankings
significantly in the long term.

Done correctly you should find that creating a unique page for each
company in the directory draws significant long tail traffic.

Create a news section

Blogging isn’t always a good idea for a commercial site. Company
politics can get in the way and the opinions of the blogger can be
censored to a point that it is no longer relevant as a blog.

The best linkbuilding tip is to create a news section on your site and
post about the latest events from your industry every day in a non
biased way. If you have a car insurance website you can post on the
latest motoring and insurance news and become a trusted resource for
this type of information. Spend the time to make sure you are included
in Google News and network with other similar sites to make sure they
read your posts. If you can break the news before other sites you will
attract links and build authority.

Try to make your news pages less commercial than the rest of your site
so users trust you as a non biased resource. Adding a news section
offers you a platform to publish the timely content that works so well
in social media and also gives you somewhere to publish company
specific news and press releases.

Publish your press releases

If you don’t want to publish press releases in a news section make
sure you have a dedicated press section instead. A well known mobile
phone company in the UK carried out a study concluding that mobile
phones were dirtier than toilet seats and missed out on hundreds of
links by not publishing the press release on their site. Interestingly
this company re-releases the press release every year and each time
the major news sites all pick it up and publish the details as new
news.

Start networking

If your company is a faceless commercial organisation then attracting
links is much harder. Make sure you participate on relevant forums and
add comments on blogs so that people know who you are and realise that
there is a face behind your website.

Use some reputation monitoring tools to make sure you know what is
being said about your brand. If customers are posting negative
comments respond to them personally and offer to help them resolve the
issues.

Launch an affiliate program

Offering an affiliate program is an easy way to persuade websites to
link to your site. Offer a generous commission along with lots of
tools, banners and articles for your affiliates to use and give
affiliates access to a dedicated affiliate manager to guide them
through the process. Allowing deep links to your product pages is a
good idea to improve conversion rates and search rankings . Some
successful merchant sites offer to write custom content for certain
affiliates as well as create dedicated co-branded landing pages.

Make sure you operate your affiliate program in house so that the
links still pass weight. Links via services such as Commission
Junction or TradeDoubler will not pass any benefits (apart from
sales).

Sponsor an event

By sponsoring an event you will usually be mentioned in the press
leading up to the event as well as in the roundup afterwards. If your
budget is limited try sponsoring events in the blogosphere such as
parties or blog contests. Bloggers are much more likely to link to
your site than mainstream media and you don’t need a huge budget to
reach them.

Give away your products for review
Sending a product to a popular website or blog for review pretty much
guarantees you a link at the end of the review.

Make your site a useful resource

Each product should have a dedicated page on your site with thumbnail
links to quality images of the product. There should also be detailed
specifications, delivery information, product descriptions and
possibly even videos of the product in action. If your page has more
information than your competitors it’s much more likely to attract a
link.

Pay to advertise

Although the adverts you buy might not pass link juice it is always
worth becoming a paid advertiser at the leading sites in your
industry. Websites are always eager to please their advertisers and
will sometimes link to them from other stories and articles.

Categories: Link Building

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