Link Strategies That Actually Work

By Kendrick Ayers

You are a webmaster, you have spent a lot of time putting together a great website and now you want to drive traffic to it. What are your options?

Short term, you will need to promote your site through advertising, traffic exchanges, traffic wholesalers and pay per click (PPC) campaigns but longer term you really want to get your website ranking high in the search engines. Firstly, you will need to make sure that your site is optimized which really means having a relevant domain name, a relevant title, relevant keywords in your meta tags and content that is relevant to your keywords and title. It is best not to have too many keywords (maybe about a dozen) and ensure that each keyword gets used several times throughout the site.

Please note, the most important thing here is the word relevant. Search engines love relevancy and they love relevant content.

The next challenge is to get lots of other relevant sites to link back to you. Ideally, these will be one way links but relevant reciprocal links are also useful. In addition to getting links from relevant sites you should also try to get links from sites that have a high Google page rank and a good Alexa rating. It sounds onerous but it really isn´t, although it does require some effort and application. First, you should concentrate on the quality of links rather than the volume of links. Focus on relevance first and then on Google page rank and Alexa rating. Here are some of your options.

Submit your site to directories. Choose directories that have a good page rank and traffic rating and make sure you choose a relevant category. Some directories are paid, some are free with a reciprocal link and some are free without a reciprocal link. Clearly the latter is better but the first two options are still useful.

Write articles and submit them to article directories. The same rules apply as for directories. Choose directories that have a good page rank and traffic rating and make sure you choose a relevant category. Your article should also include some of the keywords from your website. It is tempting to write an article that just promotes your site but apart from the likelihood of your article being refused by the article directories, such advertorial content is unlikely to be picked up and used by other webmasters. Therefore, your articles should be focused on providing useful and interesting information to your intended audience. Remember, the more webmasters that use your article, the more sites your link will appear on, that is, you are not only getting backlinks from article directories but also the webmasters that use your content.

Next you should consider link exchanges as you surf the internet and find other relevant sites. In particular, you should look out for links pages on these websites that indicate the webmaster is interested in exchanging links.

There is some debate at the moment as to whether search engines will continue to recognise paid for links. Sites such as Text Link Ads and Viral Adwords that use javascript to run text ads on other sites. If you have the budget, these strategies will not harm your search engine ranking and even if they don´t enhance it, they will deliver on their primary purpose to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Another powerful option is to offer a useful free tool to your visitors that includes a link back to your site. Statcounter have achieved a Google page rank of 10 by using precisely this strategy. Of course, you have to have the vision and skill to develop such a useful and popular tool.

In summary, if you want to rank high in search pages your site needs to have relevant content and be linked to by other relevant sites. Directories, articles, link exchanges, paid links and tools embedded with a link to your website all provide a potential opportunity to build up your search engine rating and drive quality, free and targeted traffic to your website.

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