What Amazon Can Teach Webmasters About Link Building
Amazon is a marketing force to be reckoned with and a webmaster can learn a lot just from studying the website and going through the checkout process a few times.
Just last week I went to Amazon and grabbed a copy of Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth and ended up leaving with Ewen Chia’s How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too as well.
Amazon just has an incredible knack of making the sales process easy and the recommendations they make are usually spot on. Keep the above links in mind as I will be referring back to them in a minute.
Back to the main point of this post, ‘What Amazon can teach webmasters about link building!’.
Before you start thinking that your website is nothing like Amazon in size or content, you can still learn by what they are doing! Let’s just take a look.
Amazon has content that people love to link to. People can create wish-lists and share them with their friends, people have recommended reading pages on their websites, and so on.
Amazon has an army of affiliates that link from their websites into Amazon’s interior pages (deep linking), promoting particular products.
I bet you can guess where I’m going with this! The majority of the links that people create don’t go to Amazon’s homepage, they go to interior pages.
Why is this important?
As a webmaster or SEO consultant, building links to your website is a part of the optimisation process. Having inbound links, especially from authority sites, has the benefit of generating traffic from referring websites and the search engines see incoming links as a thumbs-up pointed towards your site.
Your Take Away For The Day?
Ask many SEO’s what they would do if they were to work on their inbound link building strategy from scratch and they will say that they would generate more links pointing to interior pages of their website. You see, many people go out and start adding their site to directories and advertising sites but they only seem to add their top level domain, example: www.foxleymarketingsolutions.com.
You see, a website with links pointing to a variety of interior pages will look much more natural to the search engines than if you were to go out and generate 1000 links all pointing to your homepage.
So how do you get more inbound links to your interior pages?
Create killer content that people naturally want to link to. People are more likely to link to the actual page rather than your homepage and this is exactly what you want.
A good example of something that is useful is the Customer Focus Calculator – WeWe Monitor by Future Now Inc (lots of sites link to this tool).
Can you come up with something similar. When writing articles for distribution on article directories, create a deep link to a relevant page on your website.
When posting in forums, where you can naturally link out to a particular page on your website then make sure it is an interior page.
I’m sure you can come up with many other ideas!
So, you don’t have to be Amazon and you don’t need a massive affiliate army (although this helps), all you need to do is make your inbound link strategy just that bit smarter.
Take a look at the links above I posted about the two products I bought on Amazon. You can see that I have hyperlinked the text that is describes the product rather than saying:
‘Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth book‘
or
‘for the The Stephen Pierce’s Secrets to Creating Wealth book click here‘
These examples have much less relevance to the search engines than the links I used at the beginning of this post so try and build links that describe your content accurately (include keywords).
For optimal results, be sure to combine building your own inbound links with creating content that people want to link to.
Happy link building,
Karl Foxley
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Its a possibility to get links from affiliates linking to your internal pages but google suggests affiliate links should be nofollowed.
Another approach is to network and build relationships with webmasters of relevant sites for deep links to specific pages.
Hi Andreas,
The main point I am getting at is that deep linking is where you want to focus your time. Many affiliates do not add the no follow attribute either because they don’t know what it is or because the copy and paste code didn’t already have it included. You should always focus on building links through building relationships, whether that is with your readers who love your content and link to it, or through making connections with other webmasters (always best to diversify how we get links and traffic).
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Karl