Linking Strategies 101

Once your page is optimized for search engines it's time to create a linking strategy.
Search engines, especially Google, look very seriously at how many outside web pages link to your site.
Google assumes that if a lot of people link to your site then those people must think your site is worthwhile and has good content. In a way, everybody who links to you is voting for your site.

But it's not just the quantity of links that you get that counts.
With Google, every page in your site has a Page Rank between 0 and 10, abbreviated as PR0, PR1, PR2, etc.
The higher the PR the better. It is better to have a couple PR5 pages link to you than to have 20 PR0 or PR1 pages link to you.
The higher the Page Rank of a given page, the more likely search engines spiders will visit it frequently and actually follow the links to your site.

You can find out what the PR of a page by downloading the Google toolbar:
http://toolbar.google.com

Or you can use a free lookup utility by going to:
http://freeresourcesonline.com/check_page_rank.php

For a more indepth explanation of page rank, go to
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

So how do you get lots of people to link your site?
The rest of the the tutorial is examines different ways to get quality links

Suggestion 1
The simplest thing to to do is to put up a "Links Page" on your site.
Make sure your home page links to this page so the search engine spiders can find it and index it.
On the page be sure to tell people how they can contact you if they want their link added to the page.
You may also want to put a linking policy on your page.
On my Links Page I have the following link exchange policy:
"All sites must be acceptable for all audiences. This means we don't accept sites that show, promote, or advertise things such as porn, alchohol, gambling, drugs, illegal activities or anything that we deem to be inappropriate for general audiences."
For an example, take a look at my Links Page:
http://www.freeresourcesonline.com/directory.php

Feel free to ask for a link exchange with us!

Instead of calling it your "Links Page" you may consider naming it something else, something more appealing. I call my Links Page my Online Directory. People are more willing to have their link listed in something like a directory than just another links page.

Once you have a Links Page created look for other people who have a links page and are interested in exchanging links.
When you find someone to exchange links with, contact them and request that they put your link on their site and in return you'll put a link to their site on your Links Page.

Be sure to give them the exact html code for your link. This will make it easy for them as they can just copy & paste the code onto their links page and also ensures that the link to you is formatted exactly the way you wish.

If they deny your request for a link exchange, don't be offended but just move on and ask someone else.
If you get no response from them at all, they may not be interested or they may not be checking that email address anymore. Either way, just move on and ask someone else.

When adding a link, make sure to use the "target" attribute in your anchor tag.

Instead of adding a link that looks like this:

Make it look like this:

When someone clicks on the link it will open the site in a new browser window. This means your page is still open behind it and the visitor is more likely to keep browsing your site.

When looking for people to swap links with, it's a good idea to look for pages that are in your same niche.
Say your page is about cat toys. It would be a good idea to swap links with a page about cat food or something related
to cat toys.
When a visitor at the cat food page sees the link to your cat toys page they are much more likely to follow the link to your page.

A link exchange between two sites is a win-win for both because both get incoming links and consequently a higher page rank.
Each link exchange you do may not seem to help a lot but each little bit does help.
Another advantage of this is you may get an increase in traffic to your site. Say you have a link exchange with 100 pages, and each one sends you 1 visitor a day. That's 100 visitors a day or 3,000 visitors to your site every month. Not bad.

Suggestion 2

With the Internet, content is king. When someone gets on the net they are looking for information. Webmasters all over are
looking for information or content to put on their site to make their site more valuable to their visitors.

That's where article writing comes in. You can write an article on some topic, put a link to your site in the article, and offer the article to webmasters as a source of free content.

Once you have written an article or two you can post it at:
http://www.articlecity.com/article_submission.shtml

You should also post it on your website and at the end notify the reader that they may take a copy of the article and post it on their own site as long they don't modify the content or alter the links.

The more people that post your article on their site, the more people that link to your site. Each article should have at least one link to your site.

Writing articles on a given topic can be a daunting task. It takes time, effort and a lot of patience. Don't try to write an article
in one sitting. Write a draft of the article and leave it for a while. When you come back you may find you have new ideas or a
different perspective on things.

Before posting your articles, be sure to have someone proof-read your work and let you know about any problems.

Suggestion 3

Similiar to the writing of articles is the publishing of ebooks.
Take several of the articles you've written and put them into an ebook. Make sure the ebook links to your site and any
affiliate links you may have. Be sure to give people a reason to follow the link back to your site. If the content of your ebook
is good and you say there are more free articles on your site people are quite likely to follow the link to your site.

Once people know about your site and feel you have a good content they may link to from their site.

Suggestion 4

If you want a page with a high page rank to link to you and are willing to spend a little bit of money you can
purchase links.

Here are some sites where high page rank links can be bought:
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
http:///www.text-link-ads.com
http://www.linkadage.com

Suggestion 5

If you buy some product or service from a website and you feel it is a good product you can write a product review or
endorsement. At the bottom put your name and a link to your site and submit your endorsement to the site where you bought
the product. With any luck they'll post it on the site, giving a free link to your site.

Suggestion 6

Visit online forums related to the topic of your site and post some messages. If you have a site about cat toys, find a forum
about cats. When you post a message be sure to add your name at the bottom and a link to your site below your name.

Search engines frequently search forums and will find the links to your site.

Suggestion 7

Get a blog! Search engines are always looking for new content on web sites are blogs frequently have new content. Search
engines seem to like visit and index blogs more than your average website.

An example of blog can be found at:
http://freeresourcesonline.blogspot.com/

Get your own blog for free at:
http://www.blogger.com/start

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