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treeline - 7:18 pm on May 15, 2006 (gmt 0)


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Where do you start?

There's lots of ways to get more links. All the good ones involve work, but stick at it and it can be done:

  • Request a listing at dmoz.org

  • Search Yahoo or Google for "keywords add url" or "my industry submit site" to find related directories

  • Look for related businesses that you aren't in direct competition with, call or email them personally and ask about swapping links. If you're a hotel, do this with local restaurants and museums. If you're a bank, swap links with realtors and auto dealers.

  • Write articles (with embedded links) and send them out as press releases. Some will show them on their site.

  • Ask all your friends. All of them.

  • Sometimes forums (not this one) or blogs let you add a signature with your link. Participate meaningfully and this is tolerated. These may not be the best links, but they can help, especially as you control the link text.

  • Become an active regular participant in a forum on your subject. Reply to posts, be seen as an expert on the subject. You'll make friends amongst the other participants who will then be interested in helping you and linking to you.

  • Learn to use the forum's codes so you can put deep links to your interior pages that answer detailed questions. Use good keyworded link text. Should look like the next bullet:

  • Use Yahoo's site explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com] to research who your competition has links from, call them up and ask if you can swap links too.

  • When you're bored working on your site, browse the web looking over what the competition has done. Look for chances to get links from them, or follow where they're linking to, many of which pages will be good places to ask for links.

  • Be patient. This takes a while. Be tolerant, many people will be agreeable but not get around to it. Remind politely after a while, but if they still don't get to it, forget them and keep going. I've seen friends get all wound up because someone has too much of a life to get around to updating their website. Just find new sites to ask.

  • Try to get the attention of local media. Getting picked up by a newspaper, even an "alternative" one can get you some very valuable links. Get interviewed, tell a colorful story.

  • Offer to write articles for other sites that could use them. Embed good links within them. Associations and other authorities often desperately need good material and have great rank with search engines. You could be their best friend, and vice versa.

  • Be a pal. Offer to create basic websites for a few friends. Now that they love you, they won't mind a link or two back to such a nice guy (or gal).

  • Get to know some bloggers. They're becoming a major linking force. Tell them a colorful story so they can write something good about you.

  • Create useful content on your site that others interested in the subject will want to link to on their own. You'll start to get links you don't know about until the referrals show up in your log.

  • Best of all, create link bait: a feature or function so useful to your audience that people just have to link to it. This is usually interactive. If you're into kites, a wind forecaster. Do pharmaceuticals? If they enter all their drugs, it finds any possible interactions. Baseball cards? A value projector of what cards for drafted (but not yet playing) players cards will be worth in 5 years. Who can resist checking, even if future results are not guaranteed?

  • Try being controversial. If you write why it's best to retire on $7 dollars a month for life, all the finance blogs are going to make fun of you with links to your opinion.

  • Keep trying. Keep asking. Stick at it.

    Then one day, others will be saying how it's no fair you're at the top just because you've been around a while. They won't understand it was hard work, and they won't think it's fair they don't rank at the top just because they had the clever idea of creating a new site.

    [edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:53 pm (utc) on May 16, 2006]

    Thread source:: http://www.webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search/4004.htm
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