By Max St John
Link building is often considered as part of a search marketing campaign. In the simplest terms, the theory goes like this: the more quality incoming links you have coming to your website, the happier search engines like Google or Yahoo will be with it.
If they're happy, they're more likely to give your pages a better 'page rank'. In turn, these are more likely to place higher in their organic (or natural) search listings.
But link-building has a value outside of search - and it can help to drive long-term sales.
How do I get more incoming links to my site?
As a business, your site will be focused on your product or service. While that's vital information on its own, it's not going to get that many people linking to you (apart from partners and affiliates).
The only way you're going to get visitors linking to you (bookmarking you), is by giving them something of value for free.
This doesn’t necessarily mean giving away merchandise – free iPods will undoubtedly attract attention but the extra traffic is unlikely to be the qualified audience you're after.
Instead, offer your expertise. As a professional, whatever your field, you've got knowledge and insight that others want and some are willing to pay for.
How do links convert to sales?
By creating a knowledge section or blog on your website and sharing your thoughts and experience, you'll build trust with your audience.
If you provide content that's of genuine use, even if you don’t initially see how it is adding value to you, people will want to read it and crucially, they’ll want to pass it on to others.
Make sure what you offer, whether it's a unique insight into the latest industry move or tips for best practice, is as relevant and valuable to your target audience as possible. If you do, the chances of attracting more of that audience over to your site are increased.
Do this successfully and you'll not only bolster your credibility but you'll increase the chances of converting a proportion of these people either to customers or advocates of your site.
You can make sure people can easily link to your knowledge content or blog, you can optimise your site for the various bookmarking sites out there like del.icio.us and Digg.
Read our knowledge feature on social bookmarking.