For small businesses, the key to getting good rankings is to increase link popularity. Unlike larger businesses that can run massive campaigns or will get link popularity based on brand name alone, a small business needs to work to make a presence online.
As you probably know now, link popularity isn’t just about numbers. The top three factors in ranking factors are the quantity of quality links, keyword focused anchor texts of any external link, and having links from many different root domains. Depending on your small business, link popularity can be very hard to get if you don’t know where to look.
One of the great things about building link popularity for small businesses is that there is often a localized target audience. That means you can focus your link popularity on a local level, thus weeding out a lot of the competition.
There are many places for getting free and easy backlinks such as local directories, Yellow Pages, and so on. You can also find local blogs that are in your niche and ask for a backlink. You might not have a strong link popularity for your entire niche, but you will be extremely popular for the niche in your area.
When working on your link popularity, you should be making a long-term plan.
The major search engines factor in the frequency that you are getting inbound links as well. They will figure that something is amiss, or black hat SEO, if you get a bunch of low-quality links at once and then none later.
Even though listing in some of the major directories may cost a lot for a small business, it may pay off by considerably helping your link popularity. For example, Yahoo! costs $300 a year. Before paying this amount to increase link popularity, you may want to focus on free methods first.