How to Get Good Links to Your Website
Find websites that should have a link to your site, and ask them to set up a link to your website.
While this sort of hunt for sites to link to yours can be very time consuming, it is also very rewarding in the traffic it can build for your website. It involves going on a hunt through related or similar or somehow connected websites, contacting the right people there and offering to set up reciprocal links. These free links, once established, are often the life-blood of a stable internet marketing campaign.
Because many of these sites will want reciprocal links back to their sites, you must be willing to place a link somewhere on your own website (usually a links page) in order to set these up. In fact, it is best to set up a reciprocal link from your own website before contacting the other person. It costs you nothing and makes it harder for the person you are asking to say "no" or to ignore your request. We do not recommend putting links on your home page or in areas where the link will distract from the focus of your site.
This is best done a little bit every day by the person responsible for marketing the website, although a week spent at this full-time can get you some dramatic results in terms of traffic.
The very best way to get links is to roll up your sleeves, search the web for quality sites in topics that relate to the topic of your site (that are not your competition), and use live communication to request links from related quality sites. Ask your customers what they were looking for when they found you, and what their interests are. Keep that in mind when getting new links to your site.
By way of example, a link from Danny Sullivan's highly popular website, Search Engine Watch to our Search Engine Registration page doubled the traffic to our website overnight.
These links to your site help you in two ways:
- Links to your site can bring some traffic directly from those websites to yours.
- The search engines figure out the number of links from other sites to your site and use that as an indicator of how popular your website is -- and the most popular websites are considered the most relevant for a given search. So the site with the most links from other sites to it wins! It rises to the top of the search engine results in many search engines. Some search engines only count links from other popular sites -- so spend you time wisely here. One link from a popular site can count the same as a thousand links from other not-so-popular sites.
For some tips on linking, visit this site: Linking Strategies. Here is a long article with 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies.
This article on Dirty Linking Tricks may come in handy to help you stay away from the "bad side of town" while working on your link campaign.
One-Way Web Links: 5 Strategies - For more information about getting links to your site, here's a good summary of the subject from Joel Walsh of http://www.upmarketcontent.com.
We've had some success using Text Link Ads for some of our clients. These are paid ads that are put on hundreds of other websites, that link to your site using only text (not banner ads. Text ads!).
The same sort of paid text link ads are also available from Text Link Brokers and Link Adage.
For a free, downloadable ebook (an Adobe pdf file) on why linking matters and how to set up your own effective linking strategy, go to this site, Linking Matters and download their free report. It's well worth the time it takes to read and understand linking as part of a strategy for getting people to your site and to raise your visibility in the search engines.
LinkPartners.com is a free directory of websites that swap links with other websites. Useful for finding and setting up links to relevant websites.
ReciprocalMarketing.com offers a cheap way to buy reciprocal links - they charge a dollar per link and you get to set which categories of links you want and don't want. They automate the whole process. You set your monthly budget for how many links you can afford.
Here are some link exchange resources (in alphabetical order) for those who want to go that route:
- – Their pricing is $19.95 a month.
- - also offers
If you have feedback (negative or positive) about any of the above, please let us know about it.
Note: Some of these link resources have free options, some don't. All of them are either paid or reciprocal in some way. If you choose to go with one of these, take a look after a few weeks at who is newly linking to you for the quality of the links it gets you. And, keep checking for a few months whether it has helped you at all, either by sending in more traffic or improving your rank. Not all links are equal, so do take a good look at what you are getting for your membership.
Make it easy for people to link to your site. You can set up a page that has the code linking to your site, so they can paste it into their HTML code, and an image they can copy so that the link is easy to create.
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