Website Upgrades

Franchising World July 2008
http://www.franchise.org/Franchise-Industry-News-Detail.aspx?id=41320

With the power of your franchisees behind you, you have the resources to build thousands of high-quality links in no time.

By Chad Hill

Most customers find businesses through search engines such as Google and Yahoo. A business that lands in a search engine’s top spot is likely to have more visitors to its Web site than one that lands a lower position. Many companies rely heavily on paid searches to achieve a desirable ranking. While certainly a valid tactic, managing these campaigns can be complex, time-consuming and expensive.

An alternative and one of the most effective ways to increase a franchisor’s search-engine ranking is to focus on the natural search results for the terms its customers use when looking for the business. This is referred to as search engine optimization. SEO involves making changes to a company’s Web site and building links to the site. There are many resources and firms that can help franchisors make changes to their Web sites to improve search results. While on-site optimization helps, one of the most effective ways to improve rankings is building links to a company’s Web site.

Many businesses, large and small, spend countless hours looking for sites that will link to them. They send e-mails (most of which are deleted as “spam”), search the Web for sites that offer link exchanges, make phone calls to request links, negotiate the terms of a link and so on. The end result tends to be low-quality, costly links that do little to improve search-engine ranking. The payoff is generally not worth the effort.

Leveraging Linking Power
A distributed franchise network is inherent with unique advantages for link-building based on the sheer number of people working to grow a franchise business on the local level. Many franchisees are involved with their own Internet activities, providing a valuable resource for links to the corporate site. Franchisees also build local relationships with a number of groups, most of which have Web sites, and the potential for links is enormous.

Franchise organizations can leverage the linking power of its franchises by advising and encouraging them to build relevant links using the following strategies:

• Web sites: Some franchise companies have a single corporate Web site and others allow each franchisee to maintain a local Web site. There are advantages and challenges to each approach. The main advantage of a single corporate site is that a company has complete control and any SEO effort focuses on a single site. Allowing individual franchisee Web sites provides a valuable source of relevant links and creates an individual Web of content, but it is recommended to exercise control over how they link to the corporate Web site.

• Personal Internet Activities: Some of a company’s franchisees may have their own Internet properties for business networking or other personal matters. Ask franchisees to include a link from their site to the corporate Web site, as well as their local business Web site.

• Local Vendors and Partners: Advise franchisees to be mindful of the link-building potential when forming relationships with local vendors and partners. A link should be a standard part of any business arrangement.

• Local Non-Profits and Community Groups: A franchisee who sponsors community events, schools, sports teams or donates products or services to local organizations should not hesitate to request a link from the Web sites of these groups.

• Local Associations: Links are often a benefit of joining a local association such as a chamber of commerce.

• Blogging: Franchisors have potentially hundreds of motivated bloggers in the franchising community. Ask them to create blogs to talk about the business in their local markets. They can write about the company’s mission, products, services, brands, unique attributes and other topics that can drive customers to the business and at the same time include links to the corporate site. If a large number of franchisees blog, they can create a powerful network of links to the site. The company should coordinate the linking among these blog sites and the links from the blog sites back to the corporate Web site.

• Business Networking Sites: Ask franchisees to look into online business network sites that allow a presence in the local market. Franchisees can maintain a local listing on sites such as Merchant Circle and Kudzu. These sites allow blogs, newsletters, coupons and more. These sites often show high in the search-engine ranking. Another big plus is that for now, these sites offer free listings.

• Local Search: Advise franchisees to set up and maintain their free listings on such sites as Google, Yahoo!, yellowpages.com and superpages.com. The local franchisee can easily include and update information that is relevant on the local level. Many of these sites allow a link to a Web site.

Creating Anchor Text and Keywords
It is important to note that all links are not created equal. The majority of links on the Web contain nothing more than a URL. The URL alone doesn’t give search engines any information about a business and it won’t do much for the search ranking. It is considered a “low-quality link” particularly if it comes from a site that is unrelated to the business.

A link containing anchor text with targeted keywords that describe branded products and services significantly improves the power of that link to the organization’s site—it tells the search engines the keywords that are associated with franchised businesses. The more Google sees a company’s targeted keywords associated with its Web site, the more relevant the site will become for those keywords. Over time, franchisors should see their search-engine ranking improve for searches on the keywords in their anchor text. Strive for high-quality links that contain targeted keywords, ideally coming from sites that are related to the business. For example, a link formatted as Red Shoes pointed to www.zappos.com is more valuable than just a link formatted as www.zappos.com.

A link-building plan is essential to get the franchisees on-board with the link-building strategy.

In addition, prepare a one-page fact sheet for franchisees to guide them through the process. This will include the exact anchor text written with HTML code. It’s important that the process be as simple as possible for those who haven’t learned the mechanics of linking. The franchisee should be able to simply e-mail the link text to the site providing the link.

• Provide more than one link with various lengths of text. Some Web sites will only accept a very short link and others will allow more.

• Provide a paragraph about the company with anchor text links embedded within for sites that will accept a larger amount of text.

The question of what to do if a reciprocal link is requested will undoubtedly arise. There is no doubt that in-bound (one-way) links are best, but reciprocal links from relevant Web sites can help search-engine rankings. Try for as many in-bound only links as possible. If a reciprocal link is the only way to get the link, it’s advisable to accept provided it’s a quality Web site that is related to your business.

Getting started on link-building will initially require training and close coordination with your franchisees. Once they understand the concept and see the results, they’ll likely become more aggressive in pursuing links.

Links can and should be pursued at the corporate level too, using the same strategies that you recommend to your franchisees. There are also other SEO programs that corporate can manage including blogging, press releases, article writing, widgets and content syndication.

The effort required to build links through these recommended strategies is very minimal and the payoff is priceless when your company moves up in the search rankings. With the power of your franchisees behind you, you have the resources to build thousands of high-quality links in no time.

Chad Hill is president of CyberCMO. He can be reached at 703-49-2231 or chill@cybercmo.com.