The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
December 2005, Volume 4, Issue 12

Tools on Your Website: If You Build Them, They Will Come

by Mark Blanchard, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

If you’re at all like me when it comes to surfing the Internet, you probably have your own regular “rotation” of websites that you visit frequently. Now, think for a minute — do any of the sites that you regularly visit offer a unique tool or feature that you feel compelled to use? If so, then there are probably tens of thousands of people like you. And if that’s the case, then there are probably hundreds of webmasters who would love to link to your tool from their sites. Either way, the presence of a useful tool on your website can help generate significant increases in traffic.

Tools Attract Visitors & Links

Having unique tools or features that are useful to your website visitors are also useful to potential website visitors. Additionally, they could be useful to visitors of other websites that are relevant to your site. Tools like a loan payment calculator, a foreign currency converter, a mileage-between-cities chart, etc. can greatly enhance the user experience on your site – and make it more of a magnet for visitors than a competitor’s site that does not offer such tools.

And the presence of tools can greatly improve your ability to obtain new, valuable links from other websites. Webmasters are interested in improving the user experience for their visitors as much as you are, and often a tool can be just the motivation they need to link to your site.

Links Are Key

Quality external links are the most important factor to ranking well in search engines, and as more companies are realizing this, it is becoming more important to have exceptional sites link to you. In addition, directory listings are becoming ever more difficult to obtain a listing. Just ask anyone that has applied for a DMOZ listing or had a listing rejected from the Yahoo! Directory. You can considerably improve your odds of obtaining a link if the Webmaster or directory editor feels that the tool you offer is useful to their users as much as it is useful to yours.

Some Examples

Why do sport websites like nfl.com, nba.com, nhl.com, or espn.com have so many external links pointing to them (besides the fact that we live in a sports-obsessed culture)? All of these sites offer live scoreboards, so fans can find out what is happening with their favorite team almost instantly. For the average Webmaster, it is not easy or cheap to obtain this information independently, but it is amazingly easy to provide a link for your visitors to access this information elsewhere.

Mapquest, an entire site that is essentially a tool, generates directions or online maps for users almost instantly. Over 35,000 websites currently link to this site, helping propel them to the number one spot in Google for the keyword “maps.”

If you have ever spent any time trying to decide the best keyword phrase to target on a page of your site, chances are you have used Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. This handy feature will provide you with the approximate number of searches that were done on the Overture network (which includes Yahoo!) in the previous month, as well as other relative searches that include the keyword phrase you have entered. This is a great example of a tool that is linked to by hundreds, if not thousands of other websites, and which draws users to the site in order to access its functionality.

It Takes Resources

The primary challenge with tools is that their creation can consume a lot of internal technical resources (including development time, testing and implementation) or financial resources if this task is outsourced. This can compete with other site priorities that are beneficial to search, like optimizing URLs, adding content or cleaning code. However, given the importance of the quantity and quality of external links to a site’s credibility, tools can make the task of requesting links much more efficient and effective.

Depending on where you are in the optimization process, tools can be just the thing to help your site. If you are at the beginning of a campaign, creating tools should probably not be at the top of your list. However, if you have been at it for some time and are looking for the next “big item” to separate your site from the competition, creating a tool for your site may be the next logical step. For if you build one – they will come.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: December 2005, Volume 4, Issue 12

Tools on Your Website: If You Build Them, They Will Come

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
December 2005, Volume 4, Issue 12