Forum Moderators: martinibuster
the situation so far is that we only concentrated on our own pages, its content and its navigation. The result was a good positioning in Google and others for most of our core areas.
Partners, distributors and end-customers occasionally linked to us. Sometimes they asked first, sometimes they didn't.
We will now try to focus on building incoming links. There's three categories of sites I have in mind:
1) Partners: these are companies in related areas, whith which we cooperate. Sometimes we buy componentes from them, sometimes we write custom software for them. They can be usually easily convinced to set up reciprocal links.
2) Distributors and dealers: these are the guys who SELL OUR products worldwide. They sell other products as well. This group is usually very hesitant to link to the manufacturer, because they are afraid that the customer goes directly to the manufacturer.
3) End customers: they are the ones who actually USE our products. This group seems to me to be the toughest one to convince to set up a link to the manufacturer, because there is no immediate benefit for them.
What I now try to do is to set up "standard links". I am planning to set up a page containing different suggestions on how to link: different graphical banners to chose from, company and product logos, as well as anchor text with links.
However, the problem I see is that the usual link method is:
We sell widgets from <a href="www.company.com">company XYZ</a>.
But from what I read so far much better results would be with links like:
We sell <a href="www.company.com">widgets</a> from company XYZ.
For group 2 (resellers) I might have an incentive: a small PHP-skript which connects to our server and returns the latest product version with description. You think this will work?
OK, many questions. Is there any best practice?
For the customers to link back, I've considered, in one or two market areas, either with an order confirmation or on the site itself offering, say, a percentage discount if the customer links... but...
(a) this feels a little tacky. You don't want to mess around with the sales process.
(b) not all links are equal, and many may well not be worth the discount.
You might, in the order confirmation, simply include "link to us" instructions, or else a link to a "link to us" page... maybe prefacing this with "if you liked our product or services...." I'd be very interested to know whether anybody has tried this and whether it works.
We are not selling retail, we are selling highly specialized products in the 5K$ - 25K$ range. Actually the cheapest thing you can get from us is a component at $298...
Don't know what you mean by "returns the latest product version with description."
OK, step by step:
WE have constructed a PHP skript, which prints out the latest release version of one of our software products
THEY could paste this into their webpage
A VISITOR goes to THEIR website
The skript on THEIR website queries OUR server
OUR server returns the version number
Which in turn is displayed on THEIR page
As for your suggestion with the order-confirmation. I like the idea, but I think it's not suitable for our products. Also, I am not primarily interested in backlinks from customers, but rather from dealers/distributors.
related question...
If you could get your site to rank number #1 for its main keywords, or ten of your distributors on the first pages, which would you choose?
Okay, I work with retailers, so I like to see link support from manufacturers (what sem4u said), but retailers do link back, too. However, they are not always plain vanilla home page links. Often it is a deep link to some product detail page that is not easy to reproduce. For example, an interactive 3D product demonstration tool, or a bunch of .pdf files that they do not want to host locally (tip: have active links from -all- of your .pdf files back to your site). Similar to the discussion on the formatting of affiliate links in forum20, I am not sure if you can retain total control, or if you would even want that. But offer enough linkworthy stuff and you will gets links from everywhere, and the results will appear more organic.
What is your goal?
Getting on-topic high quality backlinks.
Our industry is very small - finding quality sites which are neither competition nor one of our own dealers is difficult. So I can't find idependent quality sites (neither to link TO nor to get backlinks). Out own distributors/dealers however ARE "quality sites" in our industry so I want backlinks from them.
If you could get your site to rank number #1 for its main keywords, or ten of your distributors on the first pages, which would you choose?
I'm not sure I understand that question correct. You mean 10 of my distributors on the first page of the SERPS, or 10 of my dealers on MY first page?
Of course I'd rather see ME on #1 in the SERPS. Actually we rank pretty high if not #1 for most keywords. But I want it to stay it that way, and that's why I think it's more than time to start linkbuilding NOW.
tip: have active links from -all- of your .pdf files back to your site
I never even THOUGHT about that one!
Now, let me re-phrase a question and get this straight: would you prefer ten of your resellers on page one of Google, or your site at #1 followed by nine of your closest competitors? The latter may feel all warm & fuzzy, but the former may generate more sales and a larger slice of the pie. The hub of a wheel should not envy the spokes. Think big.
The situation as of today is that in our special industry we are slooooowly becoming a household name, thanks to years of branding and some pretty big OEM deals as well as a quality website with growing, unique content and lots of "non-salesy" stuff. I want to stay it that way. That's my main goal.
Up to now however we did NOTHING in the area of link-building. We linked to some partners - that's it.
So what I'd like most is my site being #1 and 10 of my dealers being #2-#11 :-)
But as I said - let me think about your question since I never had looked at it from that angle.
But as a well-developed business, we do link to all manufactures whose products we carry in our "Manufacturer" section.
I don't think that php script will create a miracle. As a manufacture, you are obligated to provide the latest information on the products to distributors (catalog, fliers, price book, etc.) If you intentionally make your information harder to obtain by the distributors, they can simply goto other manufacturers and start promote and sell their product.
My suggestion for you is to keep your site uptodate and always be the FIRST to put out any news or update about your product out for the spiders to crawl. If you do it well enough, your website will soon be recgonized as the "authority". This is how it is for our biggest manufacturers. Each of their product catalogs are copied at least 100 times on the net by distributors and other sites and they are always the top 3 for any of their products.
my site being #1 and 10 of my dealers being #2-#11 :-)
Bingo. Ideally, you can lock down a top spot, followed by your best resellers in order of their importance to your success. To this end, you can do at least two cool things if you achieve link authority: (1) help your best distributors rise above their competitors, especially the ones who do not carry your products... your extended competitors (2) use it as part of your persuasion efforts to get more prominant promotion with other distributors. At least, that's how I would probably think if I was promoting a manufacturer.
Here is an example along those lines. While I spend some time as a semi-respectable ecommerce designer, I also have experience as an affiliate scum... err... publisher. One of my sites features the three main providers of a service. To the untrained eye, these sites are getting roughly equal promotion. But the first company, who gives me the red carpet treatment in every way, gets double to triple the referrals of the second company, whose help runs hot and cold... yet the second company still gets double to triple the referrals as the third company, who must have a corporate culture straight out of Dilbert. Moral of the story: everyone worries about position in the search engines, but do not forget about positioning on other sites!
I can't take credit for the first site flourishing and the third site floundering, but I'm proud to have played at least a minor part in the coporate (r)evolution.
I'll follow-up with more ideas on the actual link acquisition after the weekend.
