- Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This
requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market
are. Then, you contact each one of the sites that you discover and ask them to link to your
site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to
other sites is the least of their worries, so you may not even hear from them. If you do, it
can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other
sites for a relatively small return on your efforts.
- Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer
an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph of information at
the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method
of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content
to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be wellwritten,
accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article
that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know that you have content
available for them to use for free. Just remember to require a link back to your site in return
for the freedom to use your article on their sites.
- Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange
phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool, and many
businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In
most cases, though, bloggers aren’t just going to stumble onto your web site. It’s far better for
you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product
that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the
blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you
can’t control what a blogger might say, so it’s possible that the review you get from the
blogger won’t be favorable.
- Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be
so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press
releases as widely as possible. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts,
including benefits, and it’s sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all
or part of the press release. Use press releases to send out new items of all types, and send
them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums
will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included in
the press release. Then, when someone posts it, the link you provide leads back to your site.
- Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. Amazon.com’s affiliate
program is one of the best-known affiliate programs. You provide a link to people who
want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and then when someone
clicks through that link to your site and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal
you have arranged), the affiliate — the person who placed your link on their site — gets
paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05
per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates,
and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs.
There are some ethical considerations with affiliate programs. Many believe that because
you’re paying for the link back to your site it’s less valid than if you were to land organic
links. However, most search engines see affiliate programs as an acceptable business practice
and they don’t reduce your rankings because you use affiliate programs. The trick with
affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links. In addition,
most affiliate programs utilize some click-tracking software, which by definition negates the
value of the link, because the link on the affiliate’s page is going from that page, to the ad
server, to your site. So the link is from the ad server rather than the affiliate site.
- PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements
are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to
achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not
direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links —
you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the
practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link
farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.
- Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical
and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable
practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and
create the illusion of popularity, you’re going to do more damage than it’s probably worth
to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something
that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldn’t do it. There are
plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work
a little harder for the higher quality links.
Inbound links are such an important part of a linking strategy that some organizations find themselves
caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It’s not a bad thing to want
to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information
is from your web-analytics application. Some analytics programs will show you at least the topperforming
links to your site. These reports are usually part of the marketing element of the
application.
You can also perform a search at Google for the term link:yourwebsite.com. This returns search
results for all the web sites that Google considers relevant links to your web site. A similar search on
Yahoo! will result in a more complete list of incoming links. This is a good way to figure out who’s
linking to you unless there are hundreds of links. If there are more than a dozen or so, you could
find yourself surfing the results of this search for far more time than you have to spend examining
your inbound links.
That’s why there’s also link management software that will track your links for you. LinkMachine is
one link management software (http://www.linkmachine.net). Link management software
allows you to track and manage your links and linking strategies. It takes away some of the timeconsuming
manual tracking tasks.
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