In our discussion on Link Popularity I started talking about how you can ask people for links to your website, but so far I have not jet mentioned how important it is to go out and get links.
Why are inbound links to your website so important? It's so easy to put up a website and just let it sit there, but maintaining it, adding to it, requesting reciprocal links is so time consuming.
Your most difficult task is telling people that your website exists.
Yes you want to tell everyone who walks in the door about your website, and that they should visit it. But the people already in your store are not as important as the people searching for jewelry stores online.
I'm sure your jewelry store is the best in your neighborhood. But how can you prove that to people online? How can you prove that to Google, so that Google will tell people online?
Sorry to say, you can't slap up a small website and expect Google to think you are credible. If your website is small (less than 50 pages), Google will think you are LYING about everything you say.
Okay they don't actually think you are lying. Google is just a big computer and it doesn't have any real point of view. It just crunches numbers in an attempt to give you the answer to your question.
However, when other people link to you they are telling Google that you know what you are talking about. That, yes, this store is the best store in the area for Leslie Greene 18k Jewelry.
Each person who links to you is essentially voting for your popularity. Google would rather use the votes from other people than try to answer a question on its own.
So, hopefully you understand that having inbound links to your website is very important. You need at least 1 link to get the process started.
I know this one website that put up a few dozen pages and a product catalog with 35 items. They tried to get listed in search engines for 6 months without success. They didn't have any inbound links, and although they were doing everything correct, Google was simply ignoring them.
Google will never care about your website if it stands alone as an island amongst 34,000,000 other websites. You MUST build inbound links to your website.
We'll have to cover the specifics of how to do link building in a later lesson.
