Thursday, November 6, 2008

Link Your Way to Page #1 on Google

By Jane McPherson

One of the most critical things you can do to raise your search engine rankings and bring more traffic to your site is to convince other websites to link to yours. Running a linking campaign is free, of course, and it is not rocket science, but doing it well does take significant time and effort. I recommend a couple of ways to find websites which might be willing to link to you.

One way is to do a simple search to find websites with information about the same subject as your site, or closely related information. If you have a website about footware , for instance, you can use search terms such as "footware", "shoes", "loafers", "running shoes", and "sandals" to find sites which may be interested in linking to yours.

Or, you can take another route. Just identify a related site which is highly popular, and find the websites which link to it. You can do that with a search in Google or alltheweb.com for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and the complete URL of the popular website. For example, link:http://www.college-scholarships.com (and don't forget the colon after the word "link"). There are also software programs which can search for appropriate websites automatically.

Once you have found these websites; the websites most likely to link to yours, go to them, cut and paste the email addresses of their webmasters, and request a link. An email which is polite, well written, and summarizes the content of your website will help you achieve the best results.

Be sure to make your site sound interesting and useful, but avoid exaggeration and hyperbole. If you do not convince webmasters to check out your site, they will never link to it.

Offering an incentive may also induce webmasters to link to your site. For instance:

a. a link from your site to theirs.

b. offer information or products of value. A vacation discount certificate, the URL of a website offering a free online calendar, or a free contact management program are just a few examples of items incentives you can offer in exchange for a link.

You can easily contact 30 webmasters a day. Even if you convince only one out of ten to link to you, you'll reap 90 new links a month. With link building software, which automates everything, contacting 200 website owners daily is a piece of cake.

If you follow this advice, you should experience an almost immediate, albeit modest, increase in visitors to your website. However, the biggest benefit of a good linking campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a bit longer. There is no magic formula, and there are lots of variables, but your search engine ranking could improve in as little as a few weeks, and should continue to improve as time goes on and more sites link to you as both a direct result of your efforts and webmasters seeing your links on other sites.

If you persist in your link building efforts and have a good product or service to sell, you can realize the kind of search engine rankings necessary to bring you more income than you ever imagined possible. It happened to me and it can happen to you too.

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