Incoming links from blogs, articles and other websites are absolutely essential to your search engine optimization planning. The more links that point to your CPA website, the better. Even if the content of your CPA website isn’t optimized, numerous relevant, keyword targeted, incoming links can more than make up for that deficiency.

It’s possible, in fact, to rank number one in search results for your chosen keywords just through incoming links. That’s not to say you should neglect your site’s content when optimizing your CPA website for search engines – it’s just an illustration of the power of incoming links.

There’s quite a few ways to bring in links to your CPA website, but today we’re looking at just one of them. We’ll cover the others in a future post.

The most direct way to generate links to your CPA website is to create them yourself. It takes some time and some research, but it’s otherwise very straightforward.
Quite simply, get published on blogs or other sites and include a link back to your site.

First, you’ll need to build a list of sites, blogs, message boards and forums that accept comments or – better yet – contributions in the form of articles, columns or guest blog posts. Sites relevant to your own are best. If the site’s subject and keywords match your own, the links from that site to yours will carry more weight.

It’s easier said than done, but once you’ve got a list of sites and blogs to contribute to, it’s time to write some content. Often, you can do this work yourself without devoting an overwhelming amount of time. For example, if you contribute to a discussion on an appropriate web forum, simply include a link to your site in your signature or account’s profile. If you comment on a blog post and you have the option, include a link back to your site.

Not only to blog comments and forum posts take up little time, they’re doubly valuable because you’re interacting with a community. You can build your own reputation and value to the community while you’re generating incoming links. If you bring value to the blog or forum with your posts, more people are going to click your links and they’ll be more likely to give you their business once they arrive at your site.

Longer content – more than just comments and contributing to discussions – articles, guest blog posts and other submissions to sites are very useful as well, but require a bit more work to generate the content. It’s worth the time (or the money spent hiring or finding a writer) because every published article or post can be grown into an ongoing relationship with a publisher where you can continuously generate links into your site.

When writing your content and preparing your comments and posts, be sure to make your links relevant to your text and subject. If you’re talking about tax strategies for small businesses, link to the page on your site that deals with tax strategies for small business owners. Include your keywords in the link text whenever it makes sense, but a mix of link text and link targets is better than the same link and link text over and over again.

Every incoming link can help, but when you’re generating the links yourself, you can ensure that you get the most out of every one. It may take some work, it may be hard work, but the result can be worth the effort.

In a future post, we’ll touch on more ways to generate some incoming links. In the meantime, you can get started generating links to your site right here. Leave a comment and a link back to your site below.