The Value of Seeking and Earning Links

Ready to get your link earning on? Well we are too! Enjoy another great lesson from Rand on seeking and earning links.

Now we've got a website, let’s call it Plaid Shirts Rule. Yes, they do. As a clothing website we may want to earn some links to get our business seen in relevant places.

Why Earn Links?

Now the question is: Why do I want to earn links from these people and what's the value that I am getting from this link earning process?

Grow Traffic

The first thing you can do is grow traffic through the visitors that a linking sites sends. If our site is in an article in Esquire, that's going to send direct traffic. This means, visitors who see that link on Esquire.com, come over to my site and check things out. Maybe they'll buy my goods. Maybe they'll help tweet, Facebook, or Google+ a post about the super legit plain shirts on my site.

Search Engines Value Link

Second, we know that search engines generally value links. When a search engines values a link, it increases my opportunity to rank and my performance in current search results. To a search engine links are like votes. The more popular a page or a site is, the more that site or page deserves to rank well. Basically, that link that we earned from Esquire is likely to mean that PlaidShirtsRule.com has a better chance of performing well in search engine rankings.

Brand Growth

We can grow the brand by exposing influencers (the people who manage relevant sites) to my brand and to their audiences. We want all the people to see the cool plaid shirts we have to offer. Link earning is a great way to seed these relationships.

Earning vs Building

The reason we like calling this practice "link earning" rather than "link building" is because link building has a bad association from the past. Historically, link building has been associated with spammy and blackhat practices. Search engines really don't like that practice. Search engines value earned links and they have a lot of very sophisticated algorithms trying to make the links that you earn matter, not the links that you just build or leave along the web.

Earned links tend to drive far more traffic and far more value. Someone seeing your link on that forum page on Esquire is going to think, "Ugh, a link spammer." Someone who sees you mentioned in an Esquire article is going to think, "Oh, that's a cool brand. I should check out PlaidShirtsRule.com.”

This does not mean you should just sit back and wait to be discovered. That's not what we’re talking about. Link earning is a proactive process, but it's not just focused on paying for links or spamming links. It's focused on exposing your work to the right audience, to the people who are interested and care about your brand. That kind of exposure can drive a lot of direct traffic.