5 Linking Strategies that Work

One of the most effective ways to promote your business online, especially if you use search engine optimization to build traffic, is linking.

However, as a certified Web CEO professional, and someone who also uses only "white hat" optimization strategies, I see people make a lot of mistakes when using this technique.

Below are some of the strategies that I use to make linking more effective, as well as raise my rankings in the search engines.

1. Do your homework first. You're probably wondering what "white hat" techniques are.

"White hat" techniques are techniques that will always work with the search engines, like writing articles, blogs, and press releases, and optimizing individual pages for the search engines.

These are the primary techniques I use in addition to linking because they work.

Just ask Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Tinu is an expert when it comes to using search engines to build traffic to her sites.

She wrote me the other day to thank me for "inspiring her". I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I do know that she uses a lot of the same techniques I do to promote my sites. She now has over 90,000 relevant entries in Google, more than a lot of the top "gurus" on the internet.

The fact is, the more pages you have listed in the search engines, and the more links you have pointing back to your site, the more likely you are to be found.

Although writing articles, blogs, press releases, and optimizing pages definitely works, you still have to do your homework. This means actually doing a search in the search engines to find out how sites get to the top, i.e. what keywords they use, how their pages are optimized, etc.

I use Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, for this because it allows me to look at traffic stats, as well as see what sites are linked to each other.

To get started, search for the keywords you are targeting. Take a good look at the sites at the top. This includes studying the keywords, titles, and descriptions they use in their headers. Also, read the text of the pages. It's not that hard to optimize your page(s). Just write search engine friendly content that repeats your keywords. Make your content easy for your readers to read and understand though.

You can also read Linking Matters, http://www.linkingmatters.com. This short, and free eBook in PDF, will give you more tips on linking.

2. Link to complementary sites. I get link requests all the time and I have to reject about half of them. The reason why is that I won't link to sites that have nothing to do with mine.

I offer small business, internet marketing, and search engine optimization and submission products and services. Links to quote sites, joke sites, and shoe sites don't fit with this.

The key here is to understand that not only does Google, the most important of all the search engines, look at how many links are pointing back to your site, but they also look at the relevance of the links.