Building and Maintaining an Add Links Directory

By now most businesses have websites. Let’s face it they are essential for your clients and potential customers to have a visual medium online to engage with your business. So some of us solicit a company to design and build a website for us. Then there are the folks (like myself) that use a template and design and publish their own site (kudos).  So however you get there let’s say you got there. You’ve hosted your shiny new domain and your site is up and running. Naturally you open up your browser and select your favorite search engine and type in your websites name. Nothing. You type in your exact URL and bingo there you are! Exiting right? OK sure, I have to be honest it’s pretty cool the first time. But how often are people going to be searching the web for www.johndoeconstruction.com when they want to find a local contractor in let’s say Portland, Oregon. Most people will type three words Contractor-Portland-Oregon. That being said when you type those keywords into the search box and click search your company is nowhere to be found. You click through page after page until finally there you are on page 26. I don’t know too many consumers that will click through 26 pages to find a contractor.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Search Engine Optimization. The more and more you delve into this topic you will discover tons of ways to gain traction in the search engines and increase your page rank, thus becoming visible to potential customers. To get started I recommend SEO for dummies. Following the guidelines will be a huge step in the right direction.

Probably the hardest part of SEO is getting quality inbound links to your site. One of the major factors for search engines to place value or rank on a site is links. The more links that point to a page, and the more links that are directly related to the search keywords of a page the higher rank or relevance the search engines associate. So how do you get sites to link to your pages? That’s the million dollar question. And I think I’ve found the answer.

By building an Add Links page to your site you will have a place to put reciprocating links with other sites and pages that are relevant to yours.  Start by putting a disclaimer at the top of your page to let people know you don’t legally endorse the following sites. Next explain that the links below are resources to enhance the user experience on your site. Then you can list your specific directions for reciprocating links. There will be other construction companies like me that will seek you out. Once you have an add links page others engaging in SEO will find you by searching for construction related sites with add link pages. I believe we can start a network of contractors and construction related content that will provide page rank and enhance user experience.

Here is my add links page to check out. It might help you in trying to build yours.  http://www.sfwconstruction.com/portland-contractor/links/