Maximizing Links from Your Partners

Do you have a partners page on your website?

CHECK.

Do you link to your partners’ websites?

CHECK.

Do all your partners link back to you?

CHE -

Hmmm… I don’t know.

If that was your answer, go right now, click on all those links and find the partners page on each website. Are you there? Are you there with a link?

While doing link building for a client recently, I found it astounding how many of his partners did not have him featured on their partners page.

If you are not there – and you should be – write them an email. Better yet, pick up the phone. You have a relationship with them, after all.  They’re your partner.

What do you say?  Some pleasantries, and then a cordial mention that you happened to look at their partners page and saw that you weren’t mentioned. It was obviously an oversight, but you’d appreciate if they could correct it.

Bonus: if they use logos on their partners page, ask if it would help them if you would send them a logo with the link.  This helps them.  It also helps you.

How?

Search engines give weight to the anchor text of the links pointing to your site when they decide what terms to rank you for.  Here’s a simple example (although this isn’t the whole story): If you link to Amazon.com like this: Amazon - it will give them a push towards ranking for the term Amazon.  If you link like this: Online Shopping - it will give them a push for ranking for “online shopping.”  Which do you think they’d rather have?

Same with you.  You do want to rank for your brand name, but that will usually happen fairly automatically if you’re doing a semi-decent job optimizing your site and link building. But you really have to put in the effort to rank for your keywords. Getting some links with your keywords here pointing to your site is helpful.

If someone links to you through your logo, that usually gives you no anchor text. If you provide them with a logo image that is hosted on your site, you can add anchor text in the alt text of the image. (See here for more on alt text and using images for SEO).

(Not all webmasters may want to do this; some may prefer to host the image themselves, but it’s certainly worth asking.)

So host a decent logo somewhere on your site, and then fill in the blanks of this HTML Mad Libs:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com“><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourlogo.jpg“ alt=”your keywords“/></a>

Here’s what it might look like for us (although we are not trying to rank for this keyword):

<a href=”http://www.debi-z.com”><img src=”http://www.debi-z.com/seosite/wp-content/themes/Debi/img/DebizLogo1.jpg” alt=”Internet Marketing”/></a>

If your partner copies and pastes that HTML into his page, he’ll have a good-looking logo with a link to your site – and you’ll have some good-sounding anchor text pointing to your site.

Go straight from this post to your partners page. On your mark, get set… go!

Related posts:

1. How Do I Get Links to My eCommerce Site?