BUILDING LINKS

It has well been established that having or not having link popularity is vital to the existence of any website. So how do we find the ways and means of establishing this. Building links can be time consuming, frustrating and sometime with little or no results but it is unavoidable if we wish to establish pageranks we must build links.

Many may ask what is link popularity and why the fuss?
“Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings”(source:wikipedia.org)

Please note that quality of the websites linking to you overides the quantity, thus it is better to have a few quality sites linking to your site versus a few hundred spammy sites or link farms. There is no easy to quickly and easily build links, the use of link farms is frowned upon by many search engines and will only succeed in getting your site banned or penalized. Best quality links with be from high ranking pages and those that have some relation to your own site.

WAYS OF GETTING LINKS

I have been repeatedly told by seasoned webmasters that sometimes a simple email request could suffice. A nice well thought out email to the webmaster of a site that is similar to yours. Of course include details about your site and how they can benefit by linking to your site. e.g have their site featured on your website write a review or article about their site, take time to look over the site of the webmaster that you are requesting backlinks from, maybe suggest where the your link could be placed.

Good linking practices would be to place a link of the site you are planning to trade with on your site first and include this in your email where their link can be found along with your site information, with good keyword descriptions, this gives a much better chance of a reciprocal. However be prepared for denial,no replies or play the waiting game.

Inbound links may also be achieved by good website content, if you are good at writing, writing articles about categories that you have some knowledge in, or use the many free articles or get permission from the author to use their articles and of course provide a link back to the author of the article. If you have good content people will want to link to it thus building your inbound link.

Do a search for keywords relevant to your site, find the top sites for these keywords, visit their site/s check out their link pages, contact the webmaster via email or directly if this information is available, about linking to your site, use the methods described above.

Submitting links to the many free web directories and business directories, make sure that they are in Google’s database and have good PR can bring you many inbound links if they choose to include your site most importantly submit your site to DMOZ to the most relevant category to your site. Getting a inbound link from a major directory like Yahoo can be crucial, this requires a fee but will be a overall benefit for you.

Start your own affiliate program that way all the affiliate links point back to your site whilst also, bringing prospective visitors to your site.

Include your a signature to your emails using good keyword description in the anchor text.

Post to newsgroups, web groups, forums, chatrooms, write and post articles to ezines etc and most of all include your signature.

Promote your business offline, using local newspapers, most newspapers have online sites so this can be a benefit too. Promotion boards at your public library, business cards, you can ask businesses to leave your business card at their customer service desk or check out counters. Use your own vehicle as means of promoting by adding your logo and url to your bumper or rear window. Think of it as free advertising.

PPC advertising can bring beneficial traffic to your site, this can bring you more visitors and exposure to your site, which in turn some of your visitors may link to your site if its a good source of content.

Offer free stuff, contest, polls and giveaways, this is sure to bring in links, people love free stuff and prizes.

Add a RSS feed to your site, make sure that your site has quality content.

LINK STRATEGIES TO AVOID

Spamming forums and newsgroup.
Emailing webmasters incessantly about linking to your site.
Writing nasty little articles about competing sites.
Using bots to request link exchange.
Posting or subscribing to FFA and link farms.

CLOSING
If your think this article was informative feel free to use it. Please leave author link back attached to this article

–About–
Karleen Phillip, 32 yr female, located in Florida, Web Administrator for link-to-us.com web directory and the MSN group Domesticentrepreneurs a work-at-home group

Source: ArticleTrader.com