By Bruce Hearder
To get recognised and listed in the search engines your website needs to have links from other sites pointing to your site.
The more incoming links your site has the better the site will perform in the Search engine listing.
You can think of each link that points to a site as a vote cast for that site. The site with the most number of votes, and hence the most popular, succeed in the listing. So it is essential that you try and get as many links pointing to your site as possible.
1. One way & Recipricol Links
Imagine that I find a great website that I think the readers of my website would really benefit from. I then make a link pointing to this site saying something like, “Hey check out this great site all about model aeroplanes”.
This is defined as a 1-way link. There is no link on the other site poimnting back to my site.
Recipricol links on the other hand are setup in the manner of :
“I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”
Search eangines naturally treat one-way links as having a much higher value than recipricol links, but it is far easier to get recipricol links than 1-way links.
One of the more common methods that people have used for years to get recipricol links is to use the following methodology:
– Find the top 100-200 sites in the search engines that are related to your website’s topic.
– Look through the website and note down any contact details they might have. If there is none, then go to whois.sc and do a lookup on the domain. This will give your the registrant name and email address.
– Send each website owner an email saying what you liked about their website, and you have given them a link on your website, and you would appreciate it if they could link back to you.
Don’t expect a great response rate. A lot depends on how you word the email you send out, but 1-5% response rate is generally regarded as acceptable. I have heard stories of people gettin response rates of 20-30%, but these are exceptional cases.
2. Links in blogs.
Naturally if you have any blogs of your own, make post in them containing a link to the site you wish to promote.
Don’t make every post you have point only to one site. Search engines are intelliegnt enough to know that this is nothing more than “spam linking” and treat these links as having almost zero value.
But post that contain valuable information and contain only a few refrences to your new site are well worth while.
Don’t confine your blog post to only your blogs! If you can make blog posts on other people’s blogs then do that as well.
Failing that, comments attached to other people’s blogs are also a great source of incoming 1-way links. Admittedly this techniques has been heavy exploited by “link spammers” in the past year or so is loosing some of its effectiveness.
3. Link Directories
Link directories are basically websites that list other sites grouped together into categories. The site gives you a 1-way link.
Some of these link directories have very high PageRank (a PR 9 in the case of DMOZ.org), and so are very important links to have pointing to your site.
Admittedly not all link directories do the “right thing” by having the link on thier site point directly to yoyur site. instead they redirect the link via some internal code, so the search engines don’t count the link as a 1-way link to your site.
You can find a list of search engine “friendly” directories at
http://www.online-money101.com/list-of-directories.html
Currently the list holds about over 200 sites that could give you a 1-way link that have a pagerank of 1 and above.
It would take almost forever to manually submit your site to each of these link directories, so I strongly suggest you use a program like www.directorylinksubmitter.com
This will allow you to submit your site to nearly 400 directories. Its so easy a 10 year could do it..
4. Forum Postings
This is an very under-utilised method of getting 1-way links to your sites.
Simply find some forums that are on the same topic your website. Join these forums and start answering user questions, if you know the answers are simply start asking some intelligent questions.
But before you do this, make sure you edit your forum’s signature so that it includes a link to your newly created site.
Then every time you make a post to the forum, it will show as a link to your site.
Search engines *love* forums almost as much as they love blogs.
This is becuase forums are focused and full of user generated content.
5.RSS Feeds
An RSS feed is simply a XML formatted file that contains headlines or snippets of news of what is new at your website.
You simply submit your RSS feed to RSS directories (find a list of over 40 RSS directories at http://www.online-money101.com/wp/15/rss-directories/)
Other people find your RSS feed, and will then display it on their website. This gives you a 1-way link back to your website.
6. Articles
Writing article and submitting them to article directories site is a very powerful way to get links back to your site.
It seems like every webmaster these days is chasing fresh content for their websites and are always on the look out for articles that would be of interest to their readers.
Simply write an article say, 300-500 words in length. Include a resource box at the bottom that contains a few lines describing your site and a link back to your site.
I like to submit my articles to EzineArticles.com, GoArticle.com and ArticleCity.com
There is software available that can submit your article automatically to dozens of article directories.
Well worth checking into these software packages.
7. Last, but not least. You can actually submit your newly created website to the searcdh engines themselves.
For Google, go to http://www.google.com/addurl.htm
For Yahoo, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
For MSN go to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=SUNO
There are so many different ways to get links to your sites. Just choose some of the topics listed above and start linking..
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Bruce Hearder owns and run http://www.WebsiteSecrets101.com
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