7 Rules for Building Excellent Links While Promoting Your Language School Website
There’s more to promoting yourself and your business on the Internet than simply amassing an overwhelming quantity of links. Some websites have millions of links, yet they receive less than a handful of individuals each month and even fewer customers.
The trick is to learn how to promote your website utilizing the right mediums. Anyone can build links, but very few people can successfully build the kind of links that drive visitors who will eventually convert into paying clients and customers.
To that end, let’s cover seven rules required for excellent promotion with links.
Rule #1: Strive for Relevant, Authority Links from Related Sites
Not every link is equal. Links from websites such as personal blogs that have little to nothing to do with your language business will have little impact on your rankings in search engines.
For example, links from an authoritative website like the language sections of About.com will transfer more authority to your website than other links due to the originating website’s authority and relevance. This can also help draw visitors to your website if you run a language school or offer private online tutoring for a certain language.
Unrelated links, on the other hand, will have a nominal impact on your SERPs. Too many low-quality links from pages with unrelated content may be viewed as spam, which could result in manual action against your website from search engines like Google.
Relevance and authority are two properties that are a must for inbound and outbound links. They will help your website be recognized as a quality resource by search engines, which in turn results in ranking gains in search engines.
Rule #2: Cross-Promotion is Fantastic
One archaic method of link building was to do a link exchange. These once-proud exchanges are now seen as spammy, unnatural links that will produce few results for your website in terms of SEO.
Try to cross-promote with websites whom you have as partners. This will create a natural linking scheme that search engines love and that will result in a mutually beneficial relationship that translates to visitors to your partner’s website and to your own.
Rule #3: Create Rich Content, Get Links
Content marketing involves creating extremely helpful content that other people walk to link to through email, social media, blogs and websites.
To create amazing content, you first need to understand what your target audience needs. Resources that help them learn their target language, blogs that cover lingual nuances, resources on grammar like verb conjugation aids and even unique features like articles that relate the target language to the culture of a company can draw in visitors and links.
This kind of strategy results in a win-win situation over time, as it builds your website as an authority source while drawing in the kind of visitors most likely to become customers.
Rule #4: Leverage Social Media
By sharing your most helpful content on social media sites, you’ll spread it to people whom want to read your materials. They will then repost it when they find it useful, which in turn creates a self-promoting chain that draws visitors to your website.
Rule #5: Write Guest Posts for Premier Sites
“Picky” websites that only allow the crème de la crème to post on their websites often have the best visitors that will translate into actionable customers.
By trying to get some of your best content published on these places, you may be able to tap into that rich resource of visitors that will help you promote your website and build your business.
Rule #6: Foster Real Communities
If you run a blog, respond to comments that people post. You’ll create a real sense of community and promote others joining your conversations, which in turn will make your community more appealing to use.
If you’re working with other established communities, then become a leader by showing off your knowledge and donating your time to people who need it. This is one of the most tried and true ways to earn customers, especially when you deal with any kind of business related to language.
Rule #7: Taking from the Competition and Doing Better
One of the best sources of authentic links often remains with your competition. You can use their back links against them by finding blog pages, resource pages and more that may want your links instead.
The only problem is that your competition likely uses some of the bad link building strategies of old. You need only sift through the low-quality links to find the high-quality pages that you want linking back to you, which in turn allows you to harness strong links that will promote your website and propel you upwards in the search results.