
What do you mean “you have no back-links“. You must have back-links. Everyone should have back-links. Shouldn’t they?
Aren’t they really important?
Can my blog/website survive without them?
Let’s see shall we? Read on…
Some Interior Designers will use their blog or website as a means of lead generation and then of course that leads to REVENUE. To such people, where their website/blog appears in search results WILL affect how many leads they get. If you are one of those designers whose website is a branding statement or a follow-up to a business card or a place to get directions to your office, then maybe where your blog/website appears in Google searches is not so relevant. IE IF the target person for your company knows the name of your company then they are going to type in that name and, more often than not, you’ll pop up pretty soon…unless you are called BBC Interior Design or CNN Designers or something along those lines! You get the drift?
It is a fact that the more genuine links you have to your website the higher you will appear in Google searches than would otherwise be the case. Just go back and read that again and note the word GENUINE.
So what we do on this site periodically is link to the blogs and website of interior designers…new and old. Known and not known. We share our ‘likes’ indiscriminately. IF we do that we are doing you a favour! (So kind). Yet in the process of doing that we often add a post to our blog with your information in it. Oh and that boosts the frequency of change on our site…which Google also likes and so we benefit. (Not so kind…more of selfish perhaps?..not really we ALL gain). These kind of back-links are good. They are genuine. They might help subscribers to our blog find out new interesting stuff, perhaps even from their competitors. Google kind-of recognise this and credit us both for it. Cool.
But now let’s go a little deeper and get to the home truths. Why would I link to your web site? No really … why? What is so great about it? There are a LOT of interior designers website out there (I mean a real LOT) is yours really so different? Do you copy other’s images and comment on them? That’s OK you are adding your own original content to someone else’s original image. I’d prefer to see YOUR pictures of YOUR projects and YOUR comments, that would be better but I can live with reading your thoughts and views and opinions – they are often funny and interesting.
Do you just put on pretty pictures and sleek images and have a really nice looking site. That’s potentially great. I’ll link to it once. BUT I WILL NEVER COME BACK. EVER. There you go you got me…and then you let me go.
You’ve got to have compelling, original content that changes regularly. If you have that EVERYTHING works; I come back Google thinks you’re wonderful and so on.
It’s a bit hard to do though isn’t it. Finding the time to write perhaps 2 or 3 times a week. You can be original and maybe even funny for a few months but it gets harder after that. Sorry just stating a ‘fact’ there, no magic solutions. Be creative, perhaps? That’s your job right?
Anyway. You’ve come to the point where you are running out of stuff to say and you remember that those back-links are darned good things to have. So you go with a company who you pay a bit of cash to to create links to your site from hundreds of pseudo-fake sites that they have created. This used to kind-of work. But the people at Google are clever, they constantly try to stop you cheating. SO this works much less well than it used to.
Also again think what are these companies going to be linking back to? You have to have the content.
Let’s say you do not have a blog or perhaps one that you only wrote in for a month before giving up as no-one was reading it. So again you go down the purchased back-links route. Why? what is it going to link to? You have to have the content. & it has to change to get real people to come back.
Actually IMHO if you are a start up company with a pagerank of 1 or zero. Then I’m pretty sure that these back-links would very quickly improve your pagerank to a 2 or 3.
So what to do?
Talk and write about your creativity. Your competitors will be interested for sure. THAT won’t benefit you at all. HOWEVER there are not many interior designers doing that, so when a potential customer sees your site some of them will notice.
People in the design industry should comment and re-publicise all our work more often (that’s kind of how Houzz works in away if you think about it). When you share, you benefit, in the eWorld of Mr Google. You are opening up your secrets maybe, but those that share and participate in the online design community will gain the most from Mr Google. If you don’t share you may well keep your methods and clients secret but you may also never appear in Mr Google’s search results.
Thoughts welcomed. Creating false back-links could backfire and could cost you money. And we ALL know it is cheating but many of us still do it to beat the system.
Great blog! Very informative!
Here is your anecdotal example that back-linking both new and well-known designers/design blogs has benefits both altruistic and self-promotional! I’m a relatively new (~ 4 months running) and relatively low-traffic (usually no more than 250 unique page views per day) blogger, and I have yet to develop any sort of comprehensive marketing strategy. Suffice to say, the cross-link to my “Skulls in Fashion & Interior Design” post is much appreciated!
But perhaps more importantly, I was incentivized to click back to your original post, which then led me to explore your blog further. It is fantastic! I’ve been reading through the many posts that are of personal relevance, and I’ll definitely be sharing your blog in one of my links of interest; I’m confident that many of my readers would be interested in and benefit from the content as well. Thanks for the informative, and accurate, post!
And of course by commenting like this there is a further link back to your site…. Again we all benefit
COMMENT 🙂
Hi,
We are a Wood manufacturer and exporter with a beautiful collection of Wooden gifts and home interior decorative items.Our collection offers a wide range of the highest quality handmade home interior decorative designs.
Thanks,
Bedroom Furniture Nz
Peter thank you for the comment. When you add a URL into a quote MOST websites change it automatically to add an HTML TAG called nofollow which STOPS it from being a back link to your website from the search engines….so the most useful back-link is the url that is added against your name as a poster. Also of course the quality of the content of your comment might encourage readers to click on the link you provide.