I’m heading out today to do some linkbuilding training for a corporate office. During these trainings, I always watch for certain reactions. One is distaste at the idea of doing things like checking out your competitors’ links. Another is the thrill of dominating the front page of Google.
Both these reactions stem from a fact about linkbuilding: it’s a lot like a video game. My new website (Haden Interactive, where you are right now) launched on January first and took a day or two to get indexed. Last week, if you searched for “Haden Interactive,” you would have seen Charlie Haden there on the page with me. Great jazz player, but I don’t care how interactive his shows are; I don’t want him on the page with me. Same for that actress, Rebecca Haden; I’m sure she’s very nice and all, but I don’t want to share the front page of Google with her. I just had to get rid of them. It’s part of the game.
So, even though I know that sharing the front page with someone else will not prevent you from reaching your clients, I can relate to the desire to dominate the front page.
In fact, I think that every company should try to have control over the first page of search results. That is, when someone searches for the name of your company or for your name if people do that, then they should ideally see all things that you can change if you want to: your website, your blog, your LinkedIn profile, your Places Page, your Twitter account, your most recent press release, your YouTube videos, the article you provided and the guest blog post you wrote…
When you have control over those items, then you can update the information when it needs updating. You won’t have your old phone number there on the front page to confuse people. You won’t have someone’s negative comment, either.
In order to accomplish this, you have to have that website, blog, and so on. The search engines are looking for information about you. If you’re not providing it, then they have to take someone else’s word for it. Give them the quality content on your company that they crave, and you too can dominate the front page.
Then you move on to dominating the front page for your primary keywords plus your geographic information. Then you can work on those keywords for a larger geographic region, ending up with complete world domination if that’s where you’re heading.
See? It’s exactly like a video game. Except that it actually benefits your business.
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