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Building website traffic: Get links |
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Search engines
and directories, like Goggle and Yahoo, are usually the most
effective and least expensive methods for bringing traffic to
your website. They like keywords,
links,
traffic, and money. Give them what
they want and they will bring lots of traffic to your website.
For search engines, websites receiving
incoming links from popular sites must be popular and therefore
deserve a higher ranking. Getting Amazon, CNN, or Microsoft to
link to your website would give you instant fame and fortune.
Unless you got a brother-in-law working for these companies, see
what else you can do. |
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How popular is your website? |
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Google PageRank (PR)
is a general representation of a website's
popularity on a scale from 0 to 9. This popularity
is based on the quantity and quality of the
incoming links to your website. Websites with a
high PR value rank higher with the search engines
and have more traffic.
Seochat has a nice tool to lookup your PR.
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Reciprocal link exchanges |
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Exchange
reciprocal links with quality non
competitive related businesses. If you
are an insurance broker, link to
insurance providers. Contact your
suppliers, customers, business
partners, and ask about a reciprocal
link. Reciprocal links cost nothing
and benefit both parties. Be careful
selecting who you get associated with
to protect your image.
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How to ask for a link exchange |
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Most
website owners understand the benefits
of exchanging links. The best way to
convince them is to send them an email
describing your business, how it is
related to theirs, and politely asking
them for a link exchange. Taking the
lead and adding a link to their
website will convince them about your
seriousness.
Persuading a high PR website to link
to yours is a bit like asking asking
Pamela Anderson for a date. The answer
will likely be no but if you present
yourself well and ask nicely you have
a chance.
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Companies
such as
Free Link Central and
123exchangelinks facilitate the
identification of potential websites
to exchange links with. Be careful
selecting who you get associated with
to protect your image.
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Newsletters, articles, e-books |
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Create a
PDF document that contains meaningful, original,
useful, well organized, and easy to read information
as well as links to your own website. Offer the
people who download the article the rights to
redistribute it for free. This gives them a free
resource to offer to their users and they will put
it on their website for their users to download.
Once it is there, you get several one way links to
your website.
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Persuading
a high PR website to link to you can
be difficult. Another option is to
purchase links from companies such as
linkadage,
text-link-ads, and
textlinkbrokers. High quality
links are typically available for a
few hundred dollars a month. Be
careful selecting who you get
associated with to protect your image.
With some luck, once you get a high PR
through links purchases, the search
engines will recognize the importance
of your website and maintain your high
PR even after you stop purchasing
links. Stop paying for the links and
see what happens.
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Automated link exchange programs |
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Automated
link exchange programs are also
available but there are extra risks.
Those programs will automatically
display random links on your web
pages. Some links may be from
businesses you don’t want to be
associated with.
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A
site map is a page that lists all the pages of
your website and their relationship. With small
websites, site maps are pretty useless to visitors
but they do wonders with the search engines as they
ensure at least one incoming link to each page of
the website.
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Monitor your incoming links |
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Use the
link analysis tool from Bruce Clay to see what
the incoming links to your website are.
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Other website traffic building techniques |
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There are several other
methods to increase your website traffic and many of
them are absolutely free. See our
other website building traffic
tutorial for more details.
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