case study - fine dining guide (part 2: link building)
As part 2 of my case study for Travels in Taste, a new fine dining guide, I would like to discuss link building. As you may suspect, I strongly advocate link building as part of a complete web marketing strategy. Since the links leading to your site impact your search engine ranking, it is really important to make link building a regular part of your web marketing efforts.
Case in point. With Travels in Taste, we began link building preparations months in advance of the site launch. Since the site was not live, we could not ask people to link to it at the time. But what we did do was start conversations. By contacting webmasters ahead of time, we were able to generate interest in link exchangea and determine which sites would make good link partners. In many cases, sites we contacted offered advertising only. This prep work allowed us to gather advertising information as well (information that we can now use in deciding whether or not to do online advertising).
Once the site launched, I quickly re-initiated contact with a handful of prospective link exchange partners and within a week of launch, we had links!
Inbound links are important during the launch of a new site because they provide points of entry for search engines (i.e. when a search engine is visiting a site, they follow all the links that site contains - hence, they find your site). The more often a search engine makes it to your site, the more likely that your pages will be added to the search engine’s index. In the case of TravelsinTaste.com, more than a dozen pages have already been indexed by Google.
