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Link Your Way to the Top of Yahoo

One of the most critical things you can do to raise your search engine rankings and bring more traffic to your site is to convince other websites to link to yours. Running a linking campaign is free, of course, and it is not rocket science, but doing it well does take significant time and effort. I recommend a couple of ways to find websites which might be willing to link to you.

One way is to do a simple search to find websites with information about the same subject as your site, or closely related information. If you have a website about footware , for instance, you can use search terms such as “footware”, “shoes”, “loafers”, “running shoes”, and “sandals” to find sites which may be interested in linking to yours.

Or, you can accomplish the same thing by identifying a site like yours which is highly popular, and find the websites which link to it. Just conduct a search in Google or alltheweb.com for “link:” (without the quotation marks) and the complete URL of the popular website. For example, link:http://www.college-scholarships.com (and don’t forget the colon after the word “link”). There are also software programs which can automate this process for you, while giving you valuable information about websites which compete with yours.

After you have located the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their owners, and request a link. You are likely to get the best results if your email is brief, polite, and well written.

The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster’s visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. Be persuasive but avoid hyperbole.

You can also offer the webmaster something in return. For example:

a. offer a link on your site.

b. useful information . I’ve responded to emails offering to direct me to websites with articles on website promotion techniques.

Contact an average of at least ten webmasters a day, more if you have the time. With just a ten percent success rate, that will net you a minimum of thirty new links a month.

If you follow this advice, you should experience an almost immediate, albeit modest, increase in visitors to your website. However, the biggest benefit of a good linking campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a bit longer. There is no magic formula, and there are lots of variables, but your search engine ranking could improve in as little as a few weeks, and should continue to improve as time goes on and more sites link to you as both a direct result of your efforts and webmasters seeing your links on other sites.

Keep at it and, all things being equal, you can obtain the kind of search engine rankings which can transform your website from a hobby (as my wife originally referred to my first site) to a site which gets enough traffic to provide you with a meaningful income.