Tag Archives: search-engines

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Successful Website

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Hosting

The post The Ultimate Guide to Building a Successful Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . You’ve got an idea for a web property – whether it’s for a business, to share your thoughts and ideas with the world, or to simply find and connect with other people who share your passions. The challenge now is to build your website . If you don’t know anything about web design or HTML, then building a website can seem like a daunting prospect. But getting all the elements of a successful website into place is just a matter of knowing the right steps to take and tools to use.   This guide will cover all the main things you need to know to get started. Step 1: Determine Your Website Goals. You’re starting a website for a reason. What is it you want the site to accomplish? Before you actually start working on the website itself, sit down and really work out what you want your website to achieve. If it’s a business website, your main goal will be increasing your business profits, but you’ll want to break that down into more specific and transitional goals as well, such as raising brand awareness or driving traffic into your store. If you’re hoping to write blog posts about what you love and eventually monetize your blog , then your goals will be based on driving traffic and building a community.   Even if you just want to use your website to put your thoughts out into the world or share your creative projects, you probably want other people to find and connect with them. Successful website design depends on what you want to get out of the website. Whether you want visitors, sales, subscribers, fame, community, or something entirely different, you have to start by clearly defining and writing out your website goals.   Step 2: Pick a Domain and Hosting Provider. While you can take each of these steps separately, they’re lumped together here for a reason. Most hosting providers include a domain name (or multiple) in the cost of hosting, so you can save yourself some money by registering a domain through the hosting provider you go with.   Picking Your Domain Name Choosing the right domain name can be challenging. You need to pick something that makes sense for your websites, is easy for your visitors to remember, but that’s still available. With millions of websites already out there, a lot of your options are already taken – especially if you want to use a .com option, which is recommended since it’s what your visitors will automatically type in when looking for you. If you have a business name already, you’ll ideally want to come up with a domain that matches it or is at least similar. If you’re still figuring out what to call your brand or blog, then you have some more room to get creative here.   Brainstorm different keywords and concepts that you like and that are relevant to what you’ll be offering on the site. Put together different combinations of terms that you like the sound of and check the availability with HostGator’s domain name search until you find an option you like that’s available. Some domain registrars, including HostGator, allow you to bundle your domain purchase with your hosting plan. Let’s review how to choose a hosting plan next.   Choosing Your Web Hosting Plan When you start looking at , you may find it all overwhelming at first. The main things you need to cross off your web hosting checklist are: Does the provider have a reliable server? Research a web hosting provider’s uptime to make sure you pick one you can be confident will keep your website consistently active. Can the plan handle your traffic? Unless you have an established brand, your website probably won’t get that much traffic to start. But you want to make sure you choose a plan that can handle the amount you plan on getting. Is the plan compatible with your web design needs? If your website will be on the simpler side, then you don’t have much to worry about here, but if you have a developer that insists on using a specific type of programming language or software, you may need to choose your web hosting plan based on compatibility. A good web hosting provider will have salespeople that can help you navigate the differences between the various plans they offer and customer support that will help you learn the ropes when getting your website set up. If you’re considering HostGator for your provider, our staff can help with any questions you have and most of our plans come with at least one domain name included.   Step 3: Plan Out Your Site Organization. A successful website design requires proper organization. You need the website to be intuitive to users. And if you care about being easy to find, you also need it to be organized well for SEO . Before you work on the website design itself, sit down to figure out the main pages and categories your website will have. The most important pages should go in your main menu, which should be included on every page so it’s easy for visitors to navigate to the most important parts of the site. If your website will just have a few main pages and be pretty basic, figuring out your site organization won’t be too difficult. But if you’ll have a bigger site with a lot of different pages, categories, and subcategories, then it’s even more important to get a plan into place for how it will all be organized now. Think first and foremost when planning out your site’s organization about your future visitors. What are the categories that will make the most sense to them? What site structure will make it easiest for them to find what they’re looking for? You’ll be doing some guesswork at this point (and your analytics after you launch will show you if you got it right or need to make changes later), but do your best to put yourself in their shoes now.   Step 4: Develop a Successful Website Design. Once you know the main pages you’ll be creating and the way you’ll be organizing the site, it’s time to design your website. If you’re not adept at web design yourself, you have two main options here:     Using a website builder     Hiring a professional web designer   Option 1: Using a Website Builder You don’t have to learn coding to build a success website anymore. Now you can turn to website builders that make creating a website on your own much easier. Website builders usually offer a number of templates you can choose from to start with and let you make tweaks to personalize the site from there. You can load your own images and copy, easily change out colors, and drag and drop images and other page elements to where you want them on the page. For someone without coding skills that has a limited budget, sticking with a website builder is worth it to keep things easy, while still producing a website that looks good. And if you chose HostGator to be your web hosting provider in step two, we offer a free website builder with many of our web hosting plans, so you won’t have to spend any additional money to get started. Here are just a few of the websites designed using our free templates: Option 2: Using a Professional Designer For more complicated websites, a website builder may not cut it. If your website will have a lot of pages, include a difficult-to-build feature like creating a forum , or if you have a really specific vision in mind – then you’ll be better off hiring a professional to design your website for you. Research the design firms and freelance web designers in your area and set up interviews with anyone whose style you like. In each interview, make sure you discuss your main goals for the website and clearly describe what you’re looking for. Pay attention to the questions they ask you and the tips or suggestions they provide – that’s how you’ll get a feel for their level of knowledge and whether they’re a good fit. Developing a successful website design with the right professional will ultimately be a collaborative effort, and finding the right person to hire is the most important step of that process.   Step 5: Write Your Website Copy. The design’s important, but one of the other crucial elements of a successful website is good copy. Website copywriting is a skill set in and of itself and, especially for business websites, the words you choose will make a big difference in how successful your website is at achieving your goals. For many websites, your best bet at this step is to hire a professional copywriter who knows what kind of writing works well on the web and can help you clarify your business positioning and messaging so that it resonates with your target audience. If your website is more of a passion project than a business website with a profit goal, then it might not make as much sense to spend money on a professional copywriter. If you’ll be writing your website copy yourself though, take some time to read up on web copywriting best practices .   Step 6: Optimize for SEO. If you want people to find your website, then you need to be thinking about how to design your website for search engines as well as people (although people should always take priority!). That means learning the basics of SEO and optimizing each of the pages on your website before you publish it. Search engine optimization is a big topic, but to give you the short version, it includes: Performing keyword research to learn the terms your audience is using (and how competitive they are) Including relevant keywords in your URL structure , title tags , headings, image meta tags , and copy. Adding meta descriptions for every page on your website. Including natural internal links on your web pages using relevant keywords in the anchor text.   Start doing this before your website goes up on the web and keep doing it for every new page you add over time.   Step 7: Plan for Marketing. A successful website doesn’t start and stop with a good design. You also have to plan on taking steps to promote your website. SEO is one part of that, but you may also want to consider using tactics like paid advertising, social media marketing, and content marketing to get users to your website. New websites often need an extra push to get those first visitors. If gaining an audience is important for you to meet your website goals, then you’ll benefit from creating a marketing plan even before your website launches.   Step 8: Review All Pages for Any Errors. With your web design and website copy in place, you’re so close! Now you just need to make sure everything looks good before you actually put your website out on the wide web. Take time to read over every page and look for any errors. Make sure all your links point to the right place and all the information is accurate. Check how it looks on mobile devices and in different web browsers. This is a good phase to bring in some outside eyes. Have a friend go through the website as well to see if they find it intuitive and everything looks good to them too. You’re so close to it that someone else will have an easier time spotting usability issues than you will.   Step 9: Launch! Once you’re pretty confident that everything looks good and you have exactly the website you want, publish it to the web. Make sure to set up a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your website at this point (or before) to help with our last step.   Step 10: Monitor Your Site. No matter how hard you try, you won’t come up with the perfect website design on the first try. To fully understand what works on your website with your audience, you’ll have to wait and see what they do once your website is out in the world. Pay attention to your analytics and use the data to find opportunities to improve your website’s design, your copy, and the marketing tactics you use over time. A successful website is only a little bit about what you do when you’re building it (although all that matters!). It’s much more about what you do after it has launched. Make sure you build the best website you can, but also have a plan for what to do beyond launch day to achieve success. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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SEO for Images: Your Ultimate Guide and Best Practices

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Hosting

The post SEO for Images: Your Ultimate Guide and Best Practices appeared first on HostGator Blog . Image SEO Best Practices: The Ultimate How-To Guide SEO involves a lot of different parts, so it can be easy for businesses to overlook some of the smaller steps to practicing good on-site SEO, but every little thing you can do to strengthen your website’s SEO makes a difference – especially if it’s something other sites may be overlooking. Taking time to optimize your images for SEO is a simple and important step to making your website more competitive in the search engines. It’s the kind of little thing many businesses let slip through the cracks, which makes it that much more worthwhile for you to do. Why Images Are Important for SEO So much of how we understand SEO is all about text and keywords, but images have a role to play as well. For one thing, they’re extremely important for user experience. Think about it: if you found yourself on a webpage that looked like a Word doc with nothing but text on a white background, you wouldn’t feel like the website was trustworthy or memorable. In fact, research verifies that people are 80% more likely to read content that includes an image and 64% more likely to remember it afterward. Images are a big part of how we experience a web page. That matters for SEO because Google’s algorithm pays attention to behavior metrics that reflect user experience, like bounce rates and the amount of time visitors spend on a web page. But images can also be optimized to more directly help with SEO as well.  Where the average visitor to your page will only see the image itself, search engine crawlers see text behind the image that you can fill in to tell them what you want them to see.   7 Tips to Improve Your SEO for Images For every image you use on your website, follow these tips to optimize them for the search engines.   1. Use relevant, high-quality images. This is crucial for the user experience side of SEO. An image that’s unrelated to the content on the page will be confusing for the user, and one that’s blurry or badly cropped will just make your page look bad and unprofessional. Make sure every image you use has a clear relationship to what’s on the page and looks good. You have to be careful not to use any images that you don’t have the rights to, but you can find lots of resources online that provide free images businesses can use. Commit some time for each page you create and blog post you publish to finding at least one good image to include – bonus points if you can find a few.   2. Customize the filename. This is one of those steps that’s so easy it’s amazing everyone doesn’t do it.   Before you add an image to your website, take time to customize the filename. Change it to something that’s relevant to the page and includes one of your target keywords for the page. If your web page is about a backpack product you sell, the image could be named something like brandname-backpack.jpg. Most visitors will never see the filename, but it gives you a way to provide the search engines a little more information about what’s on the page and the best keywords to associate with it.   3. Use alt tags. This is another part of the webpage that most visitors won’t see, but search engine crawlers do. You can provide alt text for every image you add to your website that will show up in place of your image if a browser has trouble loading it. This text is one more part of the page that you can use to signal to search engines what the page is about. Always update the alt text for your images. Include your primary keyword for the page and something descriptive of the image itself. If you use WordP ress, there’s an alt text field you can fill in to do this. If you prefer to use html, you can add alt=”your alt text” to your image tag.   4. Find the right quality-to-size ratio. This part’s a little tricky, because you want your images to look really good (see: the “high quality” part of #1), but you don’t want them to be big enough to slow down your website. Site speed is an SEO ranking factor, so if your visitors have to wait a while for a page on your site to load, it’s bad for the user experience and your SEO. Often the file size of an image is much larger than it needs to be for the size it will show up on your website. If you use a CMS like WordPress, resizing how an image appears on your website after you load it to the CMS is super easy – but it means that you still have the large file size that slows things down on the backend. You can make your website faster while still displaying images at a high resolution by resizing your image files before you load them to your website. Often this is easy to do with programs that come standard on most computers, like Mac’s Preview program or Microsoft Paint. Or if you have Adobe Photoshop, you can use the “Save for Web” command to help you find the smallest file size that still provides a good resolution. After resizing, you can still make your image file size smaller without sacrificing quality by compressing them. Check out tools like TinyPNG and JPEGmini to make this process easy.   5. Choose the right file type. You’ve probably noticed that there are three main types of image files, but you may not really understand the difference between each. Understanding the different file types can help you choose the best one for your needs: JPG is one of the most common file formats because it uses small file sizes and is widely supported. But the image quality isn’t always as good as with PNG files and the format doesn’t support transparent backgrounds, so there are some cases where JPG won’t work. PNG is a file format for images that provides a high resolution and can support a text description of the image that’s good for SEO. The main downside of PNG is that it tends to require larger file sizes than JPG and GIF. It’s often best for complex images and those that include text.   GIF doesn’t support as wide of a color range as the other two, but it can be a good choice for simpler images. It supports small file sizes and transparent backgrounds. For photos, JPG often works well. For designed graphics, GIF and PNG are more common and if you need a higher quality version, the PNG is the way to go.   6. Add images to your sitemap. Google encourages website owners to submit a sitemap to them to help them better crawl your pages and get them added to the index. They also allow you to include images in your sitemap or alternately, create a separate image sitemap to submit. If you use WordPress, there are plugins you can use to generate an image sitemap for you, such as Google XML Sitemap for Images and Undira All Image Sitemap . If you prefer to do it yourself, Google provides information on creating an image sitemap here . By giving Google clear information about the images on your website, you increase the likelihood of them showing up in Google Image Search, which increases your website’s overall findability.   7. Host images on your own site. While it may be tempting to host your image on a third-party website like Imgur to save space, doing so involves a real risk. Anytime those sites are overloaded with traffic, your images could fail to load, creating a confusing experience on your website and making your brand look bad. You’ll be better served by hosting the images on your own website and using the advice provided above to make your image file size smaller so they don’t slow down your web pages any more than necessary. And when you go with a reliable hosting provider , you’ll always know your images (and the rest of your website) will show up as they should for your visitors.   Make the Time for Image SEO Image SEO is relatively easy, as far as SEO goes. By committing a little extra time to find the right images and optimize them for search every time you add a page to your website, you can give your pages an extra edge in the search engines. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO?

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Hosting

The post Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO? You’ve been creating great content, optimizing your web pages, and building links. You thought you had all your SEO bases covered, but now you hear there’s something else you have to learn all about for SEO: structured data . SEO evolves and one of the biggest changes in recent years has been the rise in rich search results.  In the early years of Google, the search engine results pages (SERPs) mostly included a couple of ads at the top and ten links with a brief description under each. It was simple and straightforward. Over the past couple of years, the SERPs have increasingly started to include results that provide information beyond that brief description. Beyond the links, you get information like the number of calories in a recipe and the amount of time it takes to cook, or pricing information for a product and how many stars customers have given it on average in reviews. And for many searches, you’ll now see a knowledge box on the right side of the page that provides additional helpful information for searchers. All of this has changed what matters most in SEO. While website owners are limited in what you can do about these changes, structured data is one of the best tools you have to gain more control over how your website shows up in Google.   What is Structured Data for SEO? Structured data is information you include in your html that provides search engines with more details on what your page is about. In order for search engines to properly understand that information, it needs to be structured in a way the algorithms are designed to understand. In practice, that usually means using schema markup to add the proper code to your page. Schema markup allows you to tell Google what type of content is on the page (e.g. that it’s a recipe, product page, article, etc.) and provide details specific to that content type that would be valuable for people to know (e.g. calories for a recipe or ratings for a product). Why Structured Data Is Important for SEO Structured data isn’t a ranking signal, so it won’t directly help you rank higher, but it’s still important for SEO for a number of reasons:   1. It can help search engines determine relevance. A lot of on-site optimization is done precisely for this purpose: Google needs to know what’s on a webpage to decide what kind of searches it should show up in. And you only want your web pages showing up for relevant searches – a pet food brand doesn’t need to show up when someone’s looking for shoes. By providing more information to Google about what’s on the page, you make it easier for the algorithm to figure out what searches your content is right for.   2. It makes your website more competitive on the SERP. Showing up high in the results is important for visibility, but even once you’re on page one, the person searching still has a lot of other options to consider. Anything you can do to give your website an edge in getting that click is worth it. Structured data can add images and helpful information that draws more attention to your webpage on the SERP and makes it more competitive.   3. It improves your click-through rates. The whole point of showing up in the search engines is to get more people to visit your website. At the end of the day,CTR matters more than where you rank. SEO professionals have found that structured data can improve click-through rates by anywhere from 5-30% . Structured data can indirectly help you improve your rankings by getting more of those clicks. Adding structured data to your web pages is a relatively easy way to improve how your website appears in the search engines and drive more traffic. For anyone that cares about SEO, that makes it worth doing.   How to Use Structured Data for SEO One of the first things you learn when you start doing SEO for your website is that it’s very competitive. Trying to figure out what you can do to make your website stand out when so many others in your niche are doing the same is an ongoing challenge. Well, it turns out structured data is one thing that not everyone is doing. In fact, only 17% of marketers were making use of schema markup as of last year. The main thing stopping people is probably quite simply that it sounds hard. But it doesn’t have to be. Google helpfully provides a Structured Data Markup Helper that makes it easy for you to input the details relevant for structured data and automatically generates the html code you need to add to your website. Even if you’re not great with html, Google’s tool means you really just need to know how to copy and paste to add the code to your website.    If you have a large website, adding structured data to all of your pages may be a big project, but if it brings up your click-through rate, the time spent will be well worth it.   Get Help with Structured Data If using structured data for SEO (or any other aspect of SEO) is feeling overwhelming, you may benefit from outsourcing the work to skilled professionals who can take it off your plate. HostGator’s SEO services can take the stress out of dealing with all this stuff yourself, while helping you on the path to better rankings and results over time. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Benefits of WordPress As Your Content Management System

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Hosting

The post Benefits of WordPress As Your Content Management System appeared first on HostGator Blog . Benefits of WordPress As Your Content Management System Setting up a new website is like setting up a new physical store. To help people find what you’re offering, you need to display your goods in a way that looks appealing, makes sense, and is easy for you to restock and update. In a retail store, the solution is fixtures; for your website, it’s a content management system (CMS). There are lots of CMS options, but for new site owners, the WordPress content management system offers a lot of benefits right out of the virtual box. 9 Benefits of Using WordPress as Your CMS   1. Your CMS Is Free. There are a lot of reasons to like WordPress , but the fact that it’s free is a pretty compelling reason to use WordPress as a content management system on its own.  It’s normal to wonder if “you get what you pay for,” but even big companies like Disney and major media outlets like Time and TechCrunch use WordPress as their content management system. And many of the plugins for WordPress that add functions and features are also free, or come in free and premium (paid) versions. Using WordPress and free plugins leaves more money in your budget for content production and promotion.   2. You Can Present Your Content the Way You Want. Because there are thousands of themes and more than 55,000 plugins for WordPress, your blog, store, or business site can have its own unique look. Consider that the official websites of Sweden , Beyonce , and BBC America all use WordPress, but have radically different looks, features, and functions:     Many WordPress themes are customizable, too, which gives you control over your site’s fonts, colors, and formatting within your chosen theme’s overall structure.   3. Your Content Is Easy to Publish, Revise, and Update. The biggest benefit of the WordPress content management system is that it’s easy for writers, photographers, video producers, store owners, and podcasters to publish their content without knowing code. Publishing a blog post and adding images is not much more technically challenging than creating a text document or a slideshow. With the right plugins, sharing videos and podcast audio is easy, too. When you want to make edits and updates, just go to the post, make your changes, and click the update button.   4. You Can Easily Add More Creators to the Mix. When you’re ready to add other contributors to your blog or hire a photo editor to update your product photos, WordPress makes it easy to add them and specify the level of access they have to your content. Most designers and writers are already familiar with WordPress because they use it for their own sites and/or because their clients use it, so you won’t have to spend a lot of time and money training new people on the basics of your CMS. And if you want to change or upgrade your site in a particular way and can’t find a plugin to do it, there are lots of developers who know WordPress and can help you create what you want.   5. Your Online Store Is Easy to Set Up. Products are your most valuable content when you run an online store. With the free WooCommerce plugin for WordPress , you can set up an easy-to-navigate, mobile-friendly catalog and product pages that convert. WooCommerce extensions for social media, payment services, and shipping companies help you promote, sell, and ship your items seamlessly.   6. Your Content Gets Found. You want your audience to find your posts, products, or business. WordPress makes it easier for that to happen, by formatting your site in a way that’s easy for search engine crawlers to navigate and by giving you a way to enter and refine your content’s title tags and meta descriptions without any coding. These tags and WordPress’ optimized structure allow search engine crawlers to quickly see what your content is about. There are also SEO plugins to optimize your site’s search engine performance even more. The free version of the Yoast SEO plugin lets you quickly optimize your keywords, preview your pages in Google results, and more. The Google XML Sitemaps free plugin builds a crawler-friendly map of your site and pings search engines when you add new content.   7. Your Content Is Mobile-Ready. You’ve probably heard many times that your website needs to be mobile friendly, and I’m going to repeat it here because it’s so true. More than half of all web traffic worldwide and almost 40% of US-based web traffic now come from mobile devices. Every type of content you include on your site—images, text, reviews, videos, product catalogs—needs to load fast and display properly on mobile devices. A mobile-optimized WordPress theme makes sure your content looks right on mobile devices, and managed WordPress web hosting delivers the fast load times users ( and Google ) expect. Together, these WordPress tools and plugins use your content to create the best possible experience for your smartphone-wielding site visitors.   8. Your Content Is Easy to Share. WordPress website business owners have many options for social sharing tools, and many of them are free. One of the most popular plugins for social , Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons, does what it says in the name, with added features like RSS feed support so people can subscribe to your content updates and a choice of social button styles to coordinate with your site’s design. Yoast SEO users can opt to use the social sharing tools built into that plugin. WooCommerce also has social media options so you can promote your products on Instagram and other channels.   9. You Can Display Customer Reviews. Your web content isn’t limited to posts and media created by you and your team. Your customers can (and hopefully will) create content for your site, too. The most valuable customer-generated content is the review, because most of us check reviews before we make spending decisions now. Embedding customer reviews on eCommerce websites can keep visitors on your site while they do their research so you don’t risk losing them when they click away to look for customer feedback. WordPress plugin WP Review has a free version that lets you choose your rating system, colors, language, and design. This plugin also supports Google Rich Snippets so your review boxes can display nicely in search results. Ready to build your WordPress site? It’s easy to get started now . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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10 White-Hat Link-Building Strategies for Local Business

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 White-Hat Link-Building Strategies for Local Business appeared first on HostGator Blog . 10 White-Hat Link-Building Strategies for Local Business When you own a small local business, you have to find the most affordable options for promoting and marketing your brand. Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, that need can put you at risk. Many of the cheapest SEO companies employ black-hat techniques based around trying to game the system – for example, building hundreds of low-quality links on spammy sites or publishing keyword-stuffed pages that don’t make much sense to humans. While some of those techniques worked in the early days of the internet, search engines have continually updated their algorithms over time to ensure that black-hat techniques not only aren’t rewarded with high rankings, but are now punished with search engine penalties . This is one area of business where cutting corners can have big consequences . You’re a lot better off employing a few white-hat link-building strategies on your own or hiring a legitimate SEO company than taking on the risks that come with black-hat SEO.   10 Link-Building Ideas for Local Businesses Here are ten legitimate link-building strategies that local businesses can benefit from.   1. Partner With Other Local Businesses. A lot of link building is ultimately about relationships. People are much more likely to add a link to your website on theirs if they have a genuine connection to your business. Research other local businesses in your area that do something related to what you do. For instance, if you sell dog treats, that could include pet groomers, dog walkers, veterinarians, and dog trainers. Reach out to the business owners to discuss ways you can help each other out. You could offer referral discounts for customers you recommend to each other or plan events together. Working together with other businesses will lead to natural linking opportunities, along with any other benefits you get from the relationship.   2. Sponsor Local Events or Organizations. In addition to local businesses, start looking into relevant local events and nonprofits that seek out business sponsorships . For event sponsorships, look up conferences, festivals, or professional events in your area and consider which of them are likely to attract people who are potential customers. Any event with a relevant audience of attendees is one that could be a good fit for sponsorship and, in most cases, your sponsorship will come with a link on the event’s website. For nonprofit sponsorships, consider the values your typical customers have and look for nonprofits that are a good match with the message you want to send to them. If you own a health food restaurant, then organizations that focus on improving healthy food access or sustainable food practices would be a natural fit.   3. Join Local Professional Organization with Directories. Most cities have a chamber of commerce and some have a number of different chambers focused on certain business owner demographics (e.g. an LGBTQ chamber of commerce, a Hispanic chamber of commerce, etc.). In addition, you can often find a number of professional organizations specific to certain industries. Identify any relevant professional organizations in your area and see if membership comes with inclusion in a directory. If so, it’s another good way to earn a local link.   4. Host a Charity Drive or Fundraiser. This tip doubles as both a way to do good and a way to earn links. When you work to help a cause other people care about, they have every reason to help spread the word to get more people involved. The nonprofit that you support will help promote it on their own site. Local journalists and bloggers are likely to cover the story as something newsworthy. And any followers of the nonprofit or publications that cover the story may be inspired to share news about it to their own followers as well.   5. Write and Promote Local Content. Content marketing is a big part of white-hat link building because when you create really great content, it gives other websites something worth linking to. A lot of businesses are doing content marketing , which means this tactic can be pretty competitive. But you don’t have to compete with every business in your industry in the search rankings, just those that serve the same local audience you do. Local businesses can therefore often gain some real traction by creating useful content that focuses on local issues. Try to find topics that are relevant both to your business and to the local community. If you own a bike shop, you could write blog posts about the best biking trails in town and provide coverage of local legislation that adds new bike lanes. 6. Connect with Local Bloggers. Many communities have local bloggers that write about things to do around town or issues relevant to residents. These blogs are often a good opportunity for earning local links. Reach out to see if the blogger is open to a relationship. Maybe they’ll provide a review in exchange for a free visit to your business, or you can set up an affiliate-style arrangement where they make a little money every time one of their readers comes to your business because of hearing about it through the blog. If you can work out an arrangement that you both consider beneficial, they’ll have a good reason to mention you on their blog and you’ll earn a new link.   7. Look for Relevant Round-up Pages. A lot of websites that have a local focus will write round-up posts highlighting the best businesses of different types – think titles like “The Best Brunch Spots in Chicago” or “The Best Coworking Spaces in Austin.” Think of different categories your business could fall into and see if there are any local round-up blog posts you could be a fit for.  For any you find, reach out to the author to see if they’re aware of your business and willing to consider an addition to the list. Don’t expect this strategy to have a huge success rate. The blogger would have to choose to do extra work in order to include your business, and also may not honestly see you as belonging on the “best” list by their standards. But if they are willing to give your business a try and see if you belong, it could earn you both a link and be the start of a relationship with a new local blogger.   8. Write Guest Posts. Guest posting is one of the most common white-hat link building tactics because it provides value both for you and the other website. Instead of asking another stranger with no investment in your business to do the work of adding a link to their website, you’re offering to do something for them that benefits them and their audience. Research the blogs in your industry and in your city to identify ones that are relevant to your business and accept guest posts. Brainstorm topic ideas that are relevant to the blog’s audience while also providing a natural opportunity for you to include a link back your website. Then start pitching. For every blog that accepts your pitch, make sure you write a really good piece and include a link or two to pages on your website where it fits naturally (don’t awkwardly force it in).   9. Do Broken Link Building. Broken link building is another common tactic that combines doing something useful for the website owner at the same time that you ask for a link. The goal here is to find examples of broken links on relevant websites that point to something similar to a page on your website. Then contact the website owner to let them know there’s a broken link on their site and recommend yours as a good replacement.  It’s alerting them to a problem with their website they may not have been aware of while offering an easy solution (that just happens to benefit you). Spotting broken links on the web may sound like an unrealistic undertaking, but a number of subscription SEO tools have features that make that part of the process easier. Once you’ve identified the broken links, it’s just a matter of crafting a solid email that explains why your webpage is a good replacement.   10. Create and Give Out Awards. People love getting awards and are quick to share about it whenever they’re recognized. If you start giving out local awards to individuals or businesses in relevant categories, it’s a good way to get the positive attention of the people you honor who are then likely to share about the award to their own audiences. If you own a local gym, you could create awards for business types your customers are likely to value such as healthy restaurants, natural food stores, or vitamin brands and open up voting to your members. It provides your customers a way to engage and provides you an entry into connecting with the businesses that win (see also, tactic #1). The winning businesses are likely to link back to your awards page and the people who love those businesses may share news of the award as well.   White-Hat Link Building for Your Business A lot of these tactics won’t just earn you links; they’ll help you become a more valuable and appreciated part of your local community. That’s one of the nice things about white-hat tactics – they’re not about being sneaky or taking advantage of weaknesses in the system, they’re all about doing things that are genuinely beneficial for the websites you reach out to, their audience, and your own business all at the same time. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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