How Quality Backlinks for Unique Home Decor Can Ease Unemployment

Article by Unique Gifts And Decor

The latest unemployment numbers are disheartening. This is not a political article about who is to blame since economics is way too complicated for me. I suspect that there is plenty of blame to go around. Nor do I have any solutions except the one proposed below.

Last year my son started a retail website that sells unique home decor products and gifts. Needless to say it has been slow going. We can hang in there because overhead is low and we do not have any employees.

There is a lot to learn about marketing on the internet and we did not take the time to learn it first. For those who are not familiar with opening a store on the internet it is akin to opening it in a black hole. If you open a physical store with an actual address people can drive by it and see it or see signs that you put out. But with a couple of hundred million sites on the Internet how do you get known. No one is going to know what your web address is so they have to find you some other way. This is where Google (primarily, and secondarily Bing) come in. They help you find places on the Internet when you type phrases in. If you are looking for a bicycle you can type in “bicycle” and it will give you places to go. If you type in “red bicycle” it is all the better because Google will narrow down the sites that it lists.

That means that the trick is to get Google to notice that your site exists so that when someone types in a phrase that has something to do with your site you will show up. This is not easy. You have to do what is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. This is a process to get Google to recognize you. There are hundreds of things that you can do, thousands of people who will try to sell you things that will assist you (but in most cases won’t) and in the end no one really knows what works because Google keeps its algorithms secret. But there are some pretty smart people out there who study Google and have figured out a few things.

One way to get Google to recognize you is to advertise with them. However, this is very expensive and is usually beyond the reach of small sites. Imagine competing against Target or Home Depot for advertising space. They will just outbid you.

Another way is to get enough people to like your site so that Google decides that you must be popular (sort of like high school) and it will show you. The main way that Google keeps track of how popular you are is by the number of “backlinks” that you have. A backlink is a link that another site makes to your site. The more backlinks that you have the more popular Google thinks you are except that it doesn’t work that way. It’s not the number of backlinks – it’s the quality. If you have 100 backlinks from sites that no one visits Google doesn’t give you any credit because it does not show that you are popular. But a backlink from CNN.com, or Fox.com or other popular sites is gold. Google figures that if these popular sites like you then you must be pretty good and your Google rank goes up.

There’s only one problem – how do you get a popular website to link to you. Popular websites don’t know that you exist anymore than Google does. It is improbable that a small website will ever get recognized by a popular website.

Here is where the unemployment rate comes in. Backlinks from a government or university website are considered good, high quality and authoritative links. If you can get a link from a.gov or a.edu site you are doing well. My proposal is that Whitehouse.gov, one of the most authoritative websites around, link to my son’s site. They can issue a press release that says if you want unique home decor go to uniquegiftsanddecor.com. Or they can bury it in some other statement. The result will be that the website will become more popular, it will sell more stuff and it will need to hire additional people to help out thus providing jobs. The beauty of this is that it doesn’t cost anything. Of course for this to work the White House can’t give a bunch of links to other retail websites or everything gets diluted. So this is a onetime chance for the White House to step up and do something to help with unemployment without having to spend any money. We will be waiting.

Authors note: This is tongue in check. The author’s heart goes out to those who are unemployed or having a difficult time in this economy and does not intend in any way to make light of the situation.