ImagesMagUK_January_2022

www.images-magazine.com JANUARY 2022 images 25 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT source of information, and your rankings are therefore likely to improve as a result. ■ Anchor text Anchor text is the text that the user clicks on when following a link to your website. When you’re creating links to your website, it’s a good idea to vary the anchor text you use. Ideally, you want to choose anchor text that fits naturally into the article, but which is also highly relevant to the linked page. You want to create a natural-looking link profile, so each time you share a new guest post you should vary the anchor text slightly. Direct-match anchor text (where you link on the exact keyphrase you want to rank for) should be mixed in with other relevant phrases, mentions of your brand name, generic anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘visit website’, as well as ‘naked’ links that look like this: www.example.com. ■ Quality over quantity The quality of the links you build is more important than the quantity. It’s better to have 10 relevant links from high-authority sites than it is to have 100 links from low-quality sites that aren’t relevant to your niche. A strong backlink profile tells Google that your website is relevant and authoritative, which can help you secure the top spots in the search results. However, you have to tread carefully when it comes to link building – not all links are good links! ■ Relevance One of the most important factors is relevance. To identify websites that are relevant to yours, you need to think about your target audience. For example, are the people who require your products/services likely to read blogs or news articles? This should give you a good idea of the types of website you want to gain links from. One of the best ways to do this is to create content that’s unique and relevant to your specific industry. By doing so, bloggers and other relevant websites should link to your content naturally. ■ Domain authority When one website links to another, it passes something called link equity (unless there’s a ‘nofollow’ tag on that link). The amount of link equity a site can pass to another depends on the quality and reputability of the linking site. There are hundreds of different factors that search engines use to determine how much clout a given website has. Tools like Moz and Ahrefs can be used to check the ‘authority’ of a website, giving you a rough idea of how much a link from that site will impact your organic search rankings. As a general rule, when you’re building links, you want to try and get links from sites with a domain authority score that’s equal to or higher than your own. This tells Google that other, high-quality websites consider your site to be a reliable Link building: what do high- quality links look like? F irst of all – happy new year. Secondly – what is your strategy to build your following in 2022? The motivation you have now may quickly fade, with the resolution to post three times a week ending up with you posting here and there without a solid plan. Without a very clear understanding of who your ideal follower is and what they will be interested to see, it becomes a real struggle to know what to post. At Squeegee & Ink, we put together an exercise which completely changed our focus: by analysing our current followers and customer base we were able to be hyper-focused on where to put our energy when creating content. The effects on the business and our following have been very positive. I no longer find myself posting content in between print jobs showing shirts that happen to be on the press – instead, I now create content that is answering my followers’ questions directly. We have also made use of platforms that have a lot of untapped potential. For example, in Clubhouse, we have made a ‘room’ where we can directly talk to local business owners. The effect of having this intimate space translates into new business Social media in 2022 relationships and orders being made. The enquiries that come from these conversations are also more valuable to us as we have purposely targeted these specific business owners to become followers. Last year saw a lot of new technology being released to help us business owners extend our marketing reach to new audiences. As always, I will jump on board any new platform and report back on what I find. Chessie Rosier-Parker is director and studio manager of Squeegee & Ink, a screen printing and embroidery studio that also provides pre-exposed screens and film to garment printers along with social media workshops. www.squeegeeandink.co.uk/ learn-to-screen-print Lauren Debnam is from ETrader, one of the industry’s leading suppliers of websites to garment decorators across the UK. www.etraderwebsites.co.uk