Increase Your Link Popularity

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The more web sites there are on the Internet, the more difficult it becomes for average webmasters to find their audiences. You can either burn through a lot of your marketing budget using banner advertising or mail campaigns - or go the smart way. If you can afford to invest some time, you're at the right place: link building strategies with a proven track record that don't cost a single dime (of course, not including your time).

We use these - and other - link building techniques for clients, who are either launching a new site or wanting to improve traffic for an existing web site. Qualified traffic to your site will increase and - even more important - your search engine ranking will improve. Many search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, ...) rank web pages according to their link popularity, which is determined by the number and quality of other sites linking to a certain site.

To improve your link popularity, you will have to find web sites that might logically link to you, contact their webmasters and ask for a link to your site. Some sites may provide an "Add your web site" form, others might require writing emails. Some webmasters will ask you for reciprocal linking; you might want to consider adding a link section to your web site, so that your site can link to your link partners, too. Think about targeting partners, distributors, resellers, vendors, etc you already work with.

The following strategies represent a solid starting point:

1. Search out high-quality link lists

There are many web pages on the Internet, that link to competitor sites of yours, but not to your site - you want to change that!

Use search engines to find such link lists. With Google, you would ask for "link:www.competitor.com" (replace www.competitor.com with your competitor's URL) and find web pages that link to your competitor's web site. It can take some time to contact their webmasters and ask them to link to your site as well, but it's well worth the effort. Have you considered paying them for a one-way link from their site? It very well could be worth the cost. But don't forget to monitor this traffic and your lead sources carefully.

2. Go after hot spots

Hot spots are high quality, high traffic, authoritative web sites. It can be more beneficial to have one single hot spot link to you than to have a hundred links from personal home pages. Thus, you must find out which sites are hot spots for your web site's industry and ask them to link to your site.

Finding hot spots is quite simple, as long as you follow a strategy. If e.g. your web site rents out DVDs online, you might

• search Google or Yahoo! for "dvd portal",
• take a look at the Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) category "Business and Economy > Shopping and Services > Video > Retailers > DVD",
• visit the category "Arts > Movies > DVD > Directories" of the Google directory (directory.google.com).

and find hot spots such as www.dvdfreaks.com, www.dvd250.com and www.webdvdguide.com.

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