Hopefully everyone had a marvelous Thanksgiving weekend filled with turkey, family, and perhaps even a little bit of shredding. It is time, however, to return to the joy of ski resort marketing, beginning with the final installment of the exhilarating “SEO for ski resorts” trilogy.

The topic for today is: LINKS. You’ve chose what search string you want to rank for, made a few on-page changes to help your cause, and now it’s time to put a little caffeine in this mixture and get ‘er really moving.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
In the neverending search for links, you’ll come across a list of link building methods as long and the web is wide. Ugly is a spammer who automatically posts comments on blogs with links to their site or their “name” as the keyword string they want to rank for. Bad is submitting your site to link directories for hours on end. When it comes to “good” links, however, try to place them:

• On pages that have content related to yours
• On popular, trusted websites (Google PageRank is one method to measure that sort of thing, this is also called page “importance”)
• On pages with as few links as possible (the more links on a single page the less valuable yours will be)

Also, start by building links with the anchor text (the text people see and click on, usually blue and underlined) as the keyword string you want to rank for. Then, slowly start to throw some variety into the mix. Instead of “colorado ski vacations” do “colorado skiing vacations” “CO ski resort vacations” and even your resort name or just “click here”. Google likes link variety.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION
You already know a couple dozen websites that offer products that are complementary to the resort/skiing experience you offer. Local ski shops, hotels, transportation, etc. You probably have a blog and so do they. On every blog platform is something called a “blogroll” which is nothing more than a list of links to sites (usually blogs) that you read, visit, or are partners with.

Contact that list of related companies and ask them to do a blogroll exchange. They put a link to your website on their blogroll and you put a link to their website on your blogroll. I love this solution because, a) you don’t have to know HTML or have admin access to the site to edit the blogroll, and b) these links show up on every blog post.

OTHER WAYS
Here are a few other ideas for snagging some good, quality links:

• Use a tool like Backlink Watch or Backlink Checker to see where other resorts in the area have links. Print off the list and go through one-by-one trying to get a link on the same sites
• Stick the URL of your site (including the http://) in the description of your YouTube videos, it will automatically be turned into a link. The effects of such links are debatable but i know some SEOs that swear by it.
• If you sponsor any events, groups, or companies, ask them to stick a link on their website footer or mainpage.

The great thing about links is not only that they help your search rankings, but they start channeling small streams of visitors to your website.  In the end, you’ll come up with more ideas of where to place links in 15 minutes of brainstorming than you would reading 15 more of my ideas. Be consistent, spend an 30-45 minutes a week building links and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.