Scout for Success

The Links & Resources Page of Your Small Business Website - Build a Good One, They’ll Come Back!

Whatever the nature of your small business, never doubt the appeal that well-organized, related information can hold for your website visitors. When it comes to finding reasonably reliable resources about a particular product, service or industry topic on the Internet, separating the wheat from the chaff is probably the most-time consuming aspect of the search. A robust Links & Resources page on your website can be a powerful tool for encouraging bookmarking and delivering return visitors to your site. It’s also a page that you or your website developer can easily update regularly.

Whether you sell a product or a service, there is almost always a resource on the Internet that would be of additional interest or helpful to the customers or prospects who visit your site. Below are some examples of solid Links & Resources content. Be sure to categorize related links together; your visitors will appreciate not having to scroll through a miscellaneous hodgepodge of Internet sites:

Professional affiliations, organizations or licensing bodies
If you belong to or are licensed by any specific organizations (i.e. the local bar association, engineering society, state licensing agency), provide links to their websites. You’ve likely worked hard to achieve membership or licensing; promote your business’s affiliation with these industry associations.

Complementary products or services
Own a pet store? Link the pet motel down the street. Operate a hair and nail salon? Link the local tanning spa. This also provides the opportunity for networking with other small businesses to exchange reciprocal links, another powerful technique to ratchet up your website in search results.

Industry white papers or articles about industry trends
If the information was interesting to you as the business owner, it’s bound to interest a portion of your visiting prospects or customers as well.

Civic, community or charitable organizations supported by your business
Being a good corporate citizen is something to be proud of. Let visitors know that your business sponsored the local Little League team, participated in the building of the local playground, or contributed to a community fundraising effort, and link the websites of those groups.

Two final suggestions: Spell out the title or name of the page or website you are sharing with visitors and hyperlink from that - don’t present a list of full website addresses for them to click on, even if you preface those with the title of the resource page or site. There’s no need, and it just looks tacky. And always, always have the linked page or website open in its own browser window. You’ve worked too hard to bring visitors to your website to lose them when they close the browser on a courtesy resource that you have shared.

Copyright © Kimberly Washetas - 2008