If you ever hear the term Backlinks (the incoming links to a website) it is probably involving their significance to Search Engine Optimization. These links are tremendously helpful in determining the popularity of accountant websites and their ranking on search engines like Google and Bing.
When you get a website posted you might notice a serious increase in emails from other businesses, countless of whom you never even heard of before, looking to exchange links with your website.
Back in the old days we used to use a technique called “link swapping”.
Suppose I was an accountant in Naples, Florida and you had a firm in key west. I would link to your website, you would link to mine, and we’d both get a boost in the search engines.
It didn’t take Google long to figure out that people were using it to game their results so they changed the way their system to track down these “reciprocal” links. When they find one they don’t give the links any value, but there’s a way to use a blog to get around this using blogs. Most businesses have blogs that are hosted on unique URLs (web addresses that are different from their main website). Rather than linking to each others websites, we can link to each other’s accountant websites from our blogs. If you don’t have a blog, or if your blog is on your main website and doesn’t have a unique URL you’ll need another web property to exchange links.
For the most part this is a win-win relationship, but there are some ways you can get burned. You need to keep an eye on your link partners or you may soon find yourself being taken advantage of.
1) Who are your new partners?
Don’t take an offer at face value. Take a little time to research the company you’ll be working with. You may think that there is no such thing as a bad link when it comes to SEO, but keep in mind that these links aren’t going to just be in the background; they will be visible on your site and your visitors and clients will be clicking on them.
If you provide a link on your site to another company’s website, people on your site will assume that you endorse them and vouch for their business. A link to a less-than-reputable website or business can harm you more than the SEO benefit from their link could help you. Proceed with caution. Don’t link to any partners you have doubts about.
2) Make sure the link offers real value.
There are lots of factors that the search engines look at when determining the value of your backlinks. Backlinks from sites that are relevant to your market will be given much more weight than sites that are loosely if at all related. This isn’t to say that other links are useless, just less valuable. If you’re an accountant in Albany a link from another CPA firm or Albany business is going to look more relevant than a link from a flower shop in San Francisco.
Keep an eye on the fine print, too. Some companies are going to try to trick you by getting you to agree to give them high value links in exchange for weak ones. Often times they will request it be on your home page or another popular page (or every page). This is because these pages are worth more than the other pages on the site in terms of SEO benefit. But where do your links show up?
Many of these sites are scammers. Try to find the page where they’ll be putting your links. I’ll wager they’re offering a link page buried deep in the site. This isn’t a reasonable trade. Not only is this location less ideal for SEO than where they asked you to add their link, it’s practically impossible for anyone surfing their site to find it and will generate no foot traffic to your site either. Other sites will give you a great link for a month or two, then they’ll quietly move or remove it after a month or two and hope you don’t notice.
3) You don’t mess around with slim.
Google, the largest and most popular search engine out there, created the PageRank system to accurately gauge the popularity of websites. They want it to be authentic as possible, so they tend to be very unhappy when anyone tries to exploit the system. Website groups that try to build up huge masses of backlinks to each other for no reason but to increase SEO benefit (aka link farms) often earn Google’s wrath and can easily be blacklisted from PageRank, negating the effect of backlinks altogether.
I’m not saying all offers to exchange links are bad. I’m simply advising caution. Accountant websites are hard to market and you have to seize opportunities when they present themselves, but you also have to meticulously weigh the value against the dangers. These swaps may give the impression of being an uncomplicated shortcut to good search position, but like most shortcuts these have a tendency to get you lost somewhere you’d rather not go.