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Articles Index >> Marketing
How Do You Get People to Link to You
by Michael Cheney
Establishing reciprocal links from other websites into yours is one of the
most important things you can do in the online marketing arena. Every webmaster
wants as many links as possible coming into their website because each and every
link acts like a vote for your site. It pushes you up the search engine rankings
and gives you more traffic.
But it’s not just more traffic that it sends you. When you establish
a link with another website you’re actually picking that site by hand.
You have an influence on exactly where your link appears. So it’s like
getting a free advert. You’ve hand picked the target audience.
When I tell people that I need to do reciprocal linking they often wonder and
ask me how do I do that? Well, it’s really straight forward.
The first thing you need to do is link to the other websites. Don’t contact
other website owners and try and get them to link to you. You should link to
them first and then contact them asking them to reciprocate.
In the order of things the first thing you should do is try and map out your
online community. There will be things that you will prospect and visitors to
your website are also interested in that you don’t provide. There may
be products that they buy before they come to you or after they come to you.
They may have parallel needs that they need to have fulfilled before they come
to your website for your products and services.
You need to think about these sites. Where else do your customers and your
website visitors visit online? Start to build a list of the best websites, the
highest profile websites that are suitable for you to link to. Try to avoid
websites that are in direct competition to yours. This may establish good link
popularity for you if you exchange links with competing sites, but the problem
is that they may steal business from you if you send customers to them.
So develop a list of websites that are non-competing but highly relevant and
of a high quality. You should also try to ascertain that these websites are
highly ranked in the search engines themselves. You can simply do this by conducting
your research on a search engine. Just go to Google.com, for example, and type
in “add link” and then the name of your sector. You’ll then
find a series of websites in your sector that are up for exchanging links.
Once you’ve developed a list of links you’ll then need to go off
and actually add these links into your website. You might do this yourself or
you might get your web developer to do it. Your web designer can be a great
help in this because there’s a lot of work involved if you do this by
hand.
Now there are shortcuts available. One such shortcut is a tool that I highly
recommend. I’ll mention it at the end of this article.
Once you’ve established the links you’ll then need to contact the
website owners and give them the details of your site. Explain why you want
them to link to you, give them a description of a linking text, remembering
to include your keywords and phrases, and ask them to reciprocate. Remove any
links that do not reciprocate and repeat the process.
This is not an easy thing to do, but if you do it using a bit of software it
can be a lot easier and a lot quicker. The best tool I’ve found is Arelis.
You can get a free trial of it by clicking
here.
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