Link Your Way to the Top of Google
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 to do that is to do a simple search to find websites on the same topic(s) as your site, or closely related topics. If you own a do it yourself website , as an example, you can use search terms like “carpentry”, “indoor painting”, “installing cabinets”, “plumbing supplies”, and “kitchen remodeling ” to discover sites which may be willing to link 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.
You can also offer the webmaster something in return. For example:
a. a link on your site.
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.
Contact a minimum of twenty-five (25) webmasters a day. If just 10% link to you, you will net 75 links a month.
Adhere to this advice, and you will see a fairly quick, if modest, bump in website visitors. The far bigger benefit of an ongoing link building campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a little more time. But, your search engine ranking could improve in just 2-3 weeks, and will continue to move up as time passes on and more sites link to you.
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.
