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How to Get Other People to Link to Your Website and Get Free Traffic!
By Sean Proske
Dec 15, 2006, 09:00

How would you go about getting a large number of highly
ranked sites to link back to your own website?

Simply asking for a link won't do the trick, even if you
offer to reciprocate. A site that gets 100,000 hits a month
won't consider it a fair trade to exchange links with a
site that gets 100 hits or even 1,000 hits a month.

In order for websites that are much more popular than your
own to link to yours, there has to be something to justify
it. Something of value needs to be exchanged. If you
can't offer at least as much traffic as you'd expect in
return, and paying for links isn't an option, then you
need to be a little creative to create value in linking to
your site. There are at least five ways to accomplish this.

1. Ezines

Write articles and then submit them to ezines. Your article
will end with a resource box that contains a link to your
website. Ezine publishers are always looking for fresh, new
content and if you can put together a few paragraphs worthy of publication then your article will make it's way into the ezines, and stick around for a long time in their web-based archives of previous issues. Search engines index Ezine archives regularly, and those pages are usually ranked fairly high. An inbound link in an ezine's archive will do wonders for your link popularity. Fill that article with keywords that are relevant to your target market and even if your website still ranks poorly, your article may very well appear on Google's first page.

2. Article Banks

Take that article you've just submitted to the ezines,
and post it on article banks. Article Banks are basically
websites that provide a source of royalty free content for
ezine publishers to use. Posting articles there is an
indirect way of submitting your work to publishers for
their consideration. For the most part, article banks
include every submission in their database, so even if no
ezines are interested in publishing your article, you still
end up with an inbound link on a site that has a high
ranking, and is spidered frequently by the search engines.
It counts for link popularity, and as with an article
published in an ezine it may still come up on the first
page of search results if you stack it with relevant
keywords.

3. Testimonials

Every business loves a glowing recommendation. Testimonials
are a powerful marketing tool, and if you're willing to
provide one it will probably be published in a very
prominent place on the recipient's website. A testimonial
is a great way to get inbound links on high-ranking
websites, and as long as you don't go overboard it's
okay to talk a little bit about your own business. For
example, consider the following testimonial.

"We were just getting ready to release our new article
submission software when we realized our website was down.
It turned out that our domain had expired and it was
pending deletion. We called our re gistrar, and in spite of
the fact it was 3am in their time zone they were able to
help us out. The customer service representative was
courteous, professional, and extremely helpful. We were up
and running again within an hour, and yes we renewed for
ten years. It'll be a long time before that happens to us
again. After the service we received, we'll never deal
with anyone else.

Sean Proske
http://www.bytefoundry.com

Has Network Solutions, PayPal, or eBay provided you with
exceptional customer service? If so, give credit where
credit is due. The potential for traffic is huge. Even
smaller sites can collectively generate a significant level
of traffic. A couple of weeks ago I paid my web host
provider a compliment. They used the testimonial and posted
it on their site. Not even a month has gone by and I've
already had 50 unique visitors as a result. Imagine 100
such testimonials out there. An extra 5,000 visitors per
month is a nice reward for saying something good about
someone who's doing a good job, and in addition to the
extra traffic it also gives your link popularity a bit of a
boost.

4. Message Boards/Forums

Find message boards or forums related to your area of expertise. Post helpful messages, and post them often. Your knowledge will establish credibility for yourself and your business. Your willingness to help others will inspire loyalty in those whose problems you solve, and they'll buy from you first. Embed important keywords in your messages, include your URL in the signature on each message you post, and just like the ezine archives and article banks, your messages will be indexed by the search engines, your link popularity will improve, and people will find your site.

5. Shareware Directories

Shareware and Freeware directories, download sites,
software archives, w hatever you want to call them; they are high-ranking sites that generate lots of traffic. If you've written any type of software then you've probably already created a listing on many such sites. If not, then it probably hasn't even occurred to you to post anything to the shareware sites. Need something to post, no problem. If you have a website then you probably have some PHP or Perl scripts to handle form submission, process orders or some other task. If you wrote these scripts or paid someone to write them for you, then you own the rights to them and you can offer them for sale or simply give them away.

Using any one of the above techniques will help you to
quickly develop a large network of high quality inbound
links from high traffic sites. The more links you have, the
more traffic ... and the more sales you'll have.

###
Sean Proske is the CEO of Byte Foundry, a software and web
application development firm, specializing in
traffic-building solutions for webmasters. To find out
more, visit http://www.bytefoundry.com


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