The more visitors you get to come to your website the better your business will do – that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

But I’m sure you appreciate that you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! Unless you can afford high-budget advertising, you’ll need to be optimize your website for both visitors and search engines and use a variety of lower-cost methods to direct traffic to your site – much as you would do for traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses.

And your Linking strategy is a vital element in this.

To maximize the number of visitors to your site, you need your site to rank well with search engines – and make them use-friendly for the ‘spiders’ and ‘bots’ the search engines use to analyse your web pages.

Tip #1: Build your Net to catch Traffic and your Web to catch Spiders!

So – continuing the ‘Spider’, ‘Web’, ‘Net’ and ‘Fishing’ similes – you need a net to catch fish (traffic) and you’re trying to build a sticky ‘web’ to catch the SE ‘spiders’!

As a friend of mine said – “Don’t try to create traffic – just go and stand in the way of the traffic that’s already out there!” – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

What you’re trying to do is to build your own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek and to make it all attractive and easy to follow for the SE spiders.

Your Linking Strategy should be about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines, driving it to your niche sites and then channelling this traffic to your sales pages.

Now, free traffic rarely comes quickly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a waiting game… you need to put in the work then wait for your traffic and rankings to increase, tweaking things along the way and adding extra links to help things along.

Tip #2: Create lots of Links

There are three types of links: incoming links, outgoing links, and internal links. You need all three to build your ‘net’.

You want to create as many incoming links (also known as ‘backlinks’) as possible, as these ‘count’ highest in the eyes of the search engines.

When a SE ‘spider’ sees lots of inbound links to your site, it says “this must be an interesting site if so many other sites link to it” and gives you higher ranking – so your website is displayed higher up the ‘natural’ search results pages.

Backlinks are particularly helpful to search engine ranking, so you should try to get other relevant websites to link to yours, if possible. And you can use links from your other websites to do this too – more about this in upcoming posts.

Tip #3: Help the Spiders!

Now when the SE spider is looking around your website, you want it to find all the ‘goodies’ you’ve put on your website, and to visit every page – and then to go on and follow your links to your other websites.

So, make it easy for the spiders – put links on each page of your site pointing to other pages of your site, so that the spiders can find their way around easily!

Tip #4: Don’t use Reciprocal Links or Link Farms

Now, the more incoming links and internal links you have, and the easier it is for the spiders to follow out-bound links to your other websites, the better your sites will rank with the search engines.

But there are two traps to avoid here!

Reciprocal links don’t work. If you think about it, it’s a bit like you lending me $100 and me lending you $100 – neither of us is actually better off, we just exchanged $100.

And that’s just how the search engines see it too – there is no ‘added value’ in reciprocal links, so they don’t help your ranking.

And stay away from link farms. Don’t pay to have thousands of incoming links created for you. The search engines will see this as link spamming and they’ll stop ranking your site altogether.

So there you have 4 tips on using links to improve your search engine rankings. Follow these tips you will get a higher ranking for your site, bringing more traffic to your site and more money for you…

You can read more in my article Linking Strategies For Your Niche Sites.

Watch out for further linking tips in future blog articles.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Tagged with: • • • •

Filed under: Niche Research

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!