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Outfitter Link Builder
Inbound Links are Important
Once you have built a great site, with good customer relevant content, and you have properly optimized your pages to appeal to the search engines, you need to take the third step and build up the inbound links to your site. This is sometimes called "off page optimization". Building links to your outfitter web site is important for a few key reasons. First, links to site are a direct traffic path to get more people on your pages. Second, a link to your site from another site is counted by search engines as a "vote" for your site and helps search engines determine the relative importance of your site. Relative importance matters when multiple web sites are after the same customers, using the same keywords. If you have competition for hunting customers, and I am sure you do, then having lots of links to your site can help you out-compete these other hunting outfitters who are after the same customers.
Link Quality Matters
The number of links is important, but so is the value of the link itself. Search engines, especially Google, use the importance of the site linking to your site in a complicated formula (called a ranking algorith that they keep secret) to determine the importance of your page.
Anchor Text
Where the link comes from is important, where it goes is important, and the link text or anchor text helps determine the relevance of the link. Here are a couple of examples that may help illustrate the difference between a well choosen and well constructed link and a poor quality link. Assuming that the example website I have made up is already optimized properly on the page for the term "Duck Hunting Decoys", I have made up fictious site names for the purpose of this illustration. In this example, Riverside Decoys (they do not exist) sells duck hunting decoys including floating decoys, shell decoys, and stand up full body decoys.
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Good Linking Example
Duck Hunting Decoys Buy duck hunting decoys including floating ducks, full body ducks, and shells of all sizes and species.
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Poor Linking
riversidedecoys.com We sell duck decoys.
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A good link has a couple of key elements. If you notice in the above above example, both links point to the same location, the rivesidedecoys.com website. The important elements are what is called anchor text. When the anchor text - Duck Hunting Decoys has relevance to the site it links to, the search engines give this a higher status. The second element is more for the human user, the written description that is not part of the anchor text as it helps the user determine if following the link is likely to give them what they want.
Choosing Good Link Partners
To make it simple, just remember that a good link partner is a site where your customers are likely to be found. That is, people who are interested in your products and other products that they are interested in. In the case of the decoy company, Riverside Decoys, where else might there customers visit? What types of sites? Cerainly other decoy companies, but it is unlikely that your competitors will be willing to link to you. A customer willing to purchase decoys may also be looking for complimentary products and services such as shot guns, camoflage clothing, retreiver dogs, duck hunting guides, duck and goose calls, and so on. Look for suppliers in these area and you will have the start of a list to build links with.
Managing Your Outfitter Link Building Plan
Identifying and contacting and managing all the links and keeping it organized can be a very time consuming task. The service we are designing will be completely web based. You will not need to install any software on your computer. All that will be required is that you insert a short line of code called javascript on your existing links page. Once you have the code installed, you are ready to use the link building service. In using the service, you will simply enter the website address and email address into a form. You then you choose the message to send to your future link partner, starting from a default message you can adapt to your liking, specify your link details including anchor text, url, and description. Once you have made these selection, click the Submit / Send button and the service will send an email to all the potential link partners inviting them to add a link back to your site. As they add links back to your site, they also indicate that they have a link in place and the service is updated and will indicate that a link is in place. You will know not to hassle them in the future and instead can focus on the rest of your link targets.
We are currently in the testing stages of the beta application "Outfitter Link Builder". If you would like to be notified when we are ready to roll out the service please send us an email to gjs@s3outdoors.com
Is there a cost to use the Outfitter Link Building service? Of course there is, but the fees are not on a per use basis, rather you will pay an annual subscription fee for access and use of the service, including the rights to use the code on your links page that retrieves the links from our internal databases. Firm pricing will be available in the near future, and yes, it is worth it!
 pheasant hunting
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 bar-b-que'd shore lunch.
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 Texas Buck
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