How to Increase Your Backlinks and Search Engine Results

(November 2007)

After reading last month's internet marketing article, DC Web Women member Kari Rippetoe wrote me with excellent questions about article marketing. She generously allowed me to reprint her questions here for your benefit. Take a peek at our email conversation about internet marketing.

Hi Deborah,

I checked out your column - great tips! I manage SEM at the company I work for, and we've recently begun an SEO strategy (something that I'm not quite as familiar with as PPC management). Part of the strategy is publishing original articles on our site. Should we submit those articles to places like ezinearticles and goarticles as well, or would that be considered duplicate content and therefore a detriment to our efforts?

Another question - what would you recommend doing in order to get those valuable backlinks from blogs? Once we've identified blogs to target, what is the best practice for getting the bloggers to link back to us for free?

Kari Rippetoe
Marketing Manager
goWholesale

Hi Kari,

Publishing original articles on your site is an excellent strategy, and your company has a good head start on search engine optimization.

To answer your duplicate content question, let’s say Google finds four pages that are the same. The robot will decide that one site is the "original" source and give that site credit. The robot bases its "decision" partly on the age and quality of the site. If you started your site yesterday and someone with a two-year-old site steals your content and posts it to their own site, they may receive credit. The chances of that happening are small. If your site is established, already ranked by Google and known for quality content, then you probably won't have this problem.

To get links on blogs, I'd join the blog community for your market and post valuable comments on respected blogs. When you fill in the comment form, there is a space for you to add your website link. Be sure to link to interior pages and not just the home page and to make the link relevant. You can also include links in the actual comment itself.

A second way is to write a personal email to blogs that target your market and ask for a link to your site/blog. You will have a better response rate with a thoughtful personal email than with a boilerplate template email. This sounds time consuming, and it is. However, you want to be selective and focus on the big fish. If you do that, you won’t have to write that many personal emails.

If you use the free WordPress blogging software and the blog you comment on uses WordPress, then you can mention that blog on your blog (with a link to the other blog) and WordPress will automatically post a 'trackback' to the other blog's comment area. That process helps create community among bloggers. That feature is one of many reasons I suggest WordPress to my clients.

Good luck with the SEM and SEO on your website!