By now you've heard the expression "backlinks". Backlinks are the links around the net that map to your site and they are focal to your website's search engine marketing push. Backlinks are a vital metric used by search engines like Google. These websites deem links to be a measure of a site's comparative relevance and rely heavily on them when deciding the position of accountant websites in the search results.
You'll find that lots of site owners suddenly want to be chums once you go public with a website, particularly as you become progressively more successful. You'll start getting emails from companies you've never even heard of that want to "exchange links" with you.
Back in the old days we used to use a technique called "link swapping".
For example, suppose I was an accountant in White Plains, New York and I wanted to find backlinks. Logically I would try to find relevant businesses to link to, for example other businesses in White Plains and other accounting firms from out of town. If you had an accounting firm in Albany, for instance, I would have contacted you and offered to swap links with you. I put a link to your website on my links page, you put one on yours pointing back. We both get a boost in the search engines.
Unfortunately this doesn't work any more, but there are ways to get around this restriction by using blogs. For this to work the blogs need to have "unique URLs". This means the blog can't be hosted on the same domain as the website it's promoting. With most free blog sites like Google Blogger, Tumblr, and Live Journal this is the case by default. The trick is to ling to each others websites from our blogs thus making the links less reciprocal. Of course if you don't have a blog, or if your blog is hosted directly on your domain you'll need some other solution. You'll need some other web property to link from or you'll be giving out much more valuable links than you're getting.
For the most part this is a win-win relationship, but there are some ways you can get burned. You need to keep an eye on your link partners or you may soon find yourself being taken advantage of.
1) Know who you're dealing with.
Don't take an offer at face value. Take a little time to research the company you'll be working with. Keep in mind that people are going to see and even follow these links so it's important to make sure you're not linking to "bad neighbors".
If you provide a link on your site to another company's website, people on your site will assume that you endorse them and vouch for their business. A link to a less-than-reputable website or business can harm you more than the SEO benefit from their link could help you. Proceed with caution. Don't link to any partners you have doubts about.
2) What's in a link?
There are lots of factors that the search engines look at when determining the value of your backlinks. Backlinks from sites that are relevant to your market will be given much more weight than sites that are loosely if at all related. Links from other types of firms still have value, especially if they're in your market, but they won't look very relevant to you.
Keep an eye on the fine print, too. Some companies are going to try to trick you by getting you to agree to give them high value links in exchange for weak ones. Often times they will request it be on your home page or another popular page (or every page). This is because these pages are worth more than the other pages on the site in terms of SEO benefit. The question is, what are they offering in exchange?
Many of these sites are scammers. Try to find the page where they'll be putting your links. More often than not, you will see a page buried deep in their site, hidden behind many vague page and link titles. This is a completely lopsided trade. They're getting a high quality link from a respected accountant and you're getting an obscure link from a spam site that doesn't offer you any real SEO or traffic value. Other sites will give you a great link for a month or two, then they'll quietly move or remove it after a month or two and hope you don't notice.
3) Biting the hand that feeds you.
The system Google uses to keep track of link popularity is called "PageRank", and they're very proud of it. It was invented by Larry Paige, one of Google's founders, back in his Stanford days and it's been getting tweaked and improved many times a year ever since. They want it to be authentic as possible, so they tend to be very unhappy when anyone tries to exploit the system. Website groups that try to build up huge masses of backlinks to each other for no reason but to increase SEO benefit (aka link farms) often earn Google's wrath and can easily be blacklisted from PageRank, negating the effect of backlinks altogether.
You don't have to look far to see the wreckage that Google penalties have left behind, but perhaps the most famous company to ever get hit by the infamous Google "ban hammer" was Overstock.com. They were lucky in that the Google ban didn't actually force them out of business, but it cost them a fortune. They got caught trying to scam Google for higher rankings and Google slapped such a fat penalty on them that the online retailer decided to start their SEO efforts all over again from scratch with a new domain name: O.co
It is not unusual for companies that email you out of the blue to be considered link farmers, especially if they don't have a valid, non-SEO reason for wanting to link to accountant websites. As you can guess, this isn't a "neighborhood" you want to be associated with. For all the help their links can offer, being blacklisted can take it all away, not just from them, but all other legitimate links you have gathered. It just isn't worth it.
This isn't to say that every backlink opportunity is going to end up being trouble for you, but it certainly pays to look into the company and the offer thoroughly before making a decision. Accountant websites are problematic to promote and you have to exploit opportunities when they present themselves, but you also need to carefully consider the benefit and the hazards. These "swaps" may give the impression of being an easy shortcut to success in the search engines, but every shortcut has a propensity to get you lost somewhere you'd rather not go.
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