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 to do that is to do a simple search to find websites on the same topic(s) as your site, or closely related topics. If you own a do it yourself website , as an example, you can use search terms like “carpentry”, “indoor painting”, “installing cabinets”, “plumbing supplies”, and “kitchen remodeling ” to discover sites which may be willing to link 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: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.

Once you’ve located the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their webmasters, and send an email requesting a link. To be effective, your email must be brief, well written, and polite, and describe your site in no more than 25-30 words.

The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster’s visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. The less hype the better.

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

a. a link from your site to theirs.

b. offer information or products of value. A vacation discount certificate, the URL of a website offering a free online calendar, or a free contact management program are just a few examples of items incentives you can offer in exchange for a link.

Contact a minimum of twenty-five (25) webmasters a day. If just 10% link to you, you will net 75 links a month.

Adhere to this advice, and you will see a fairly quick, if modest, bump in website visitors. The far bigger benefit of an ongoing link building campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a little more time. But, your search engine ranking could improve in just 2-3 weeks, and will continue to move up as time passes on and more sites link to you.

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.

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