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Increasing Traffic To Your Internet Home Business Website Using Links

By: Sarah Smith

Submitting articles is a great way to get links. In the resource box of your article is where you will place your link. Over time this can be massive. Your articles and hence your links will pop up in all sorts of places. Try to get one article written and published each week.

Writing a Press Release is also important for distributing your links far and wide. Press Releases follow a specific format. You will do much better if you do a little research first and simply follow the rules of the Press Release service you decide to use. PRWeb.com offers some excellent free advice and service in this area.

Links can be left in forums and blogs. When you participate in forum discussions you will be able to use a resource box containing your links. Depending on the forum you may find that you are unable to use your affiliate links here. Make sure you follow the individual forum rules and you will be fine. You can easily start your own blog and leave links there too.

Writing testimonials is another great way to get links especially to those higher-ranking pages. If you are involved in a network marketing type company you may find that your more experienced upline person has a high ranking web page that they may be happy to add your testimonial and link to. Perhaps you have used a service or a product that has helped your business grow. You could seek out the company involved and offer to provide a testimonial with your link attached.

Another way to increase to your links is to find link partners. These are sites that are willing to allow you to add your link to their websites in exchange for you adding their links to your website.
You can find link partners by searching for them. For example if your Internet home business were selling greeting cards you would type in one of your keyword such as greeting cards into a search engine. Follow the keyword with the words add you URL or add your site then hit search. This will show you sites relevant to your businesses that are offering link exchanges.

You will need to investigate the offers a little further. Look at each site and make sure they are appropriate for your business. There is no point in exchanging links if the site you are exchanging with is irrelevant to your business. This will not help you and it most probably will harm your websites ratings.
You also need to make sure you have the kind of website they will want to exchange links with. Some will only want to do a link exchange if your site already has a page ranking and is above a certain value. If they are only accepting link exchanges with page ranking 4 and above and your site has a zero page rank then it truly is a waste of time to proceed. You may wish to keep them in mind for later on once you have improved your page rank.

Another approach to finding link partners is to do a search on the top 5-10 sites for your keywords. Once you know who the top sites are for your keywords you can then do a search to see who their link partners are. If you were using Google as your search engine you would type in link then a colon then type in the url of the website concerned
If you were using Yahoo as your search engine you would type in linkdomain then type in a colon then type in the url of the website you are examining.
Once you have done this you can then search out the individual websites that link to the top sites for your key word. You then need to set about finding out if they would be happy to link to your site. In this way you will be copying what the top ranking sites have done and therefore you will improve your own ranking. Of course in the early stages you may hit some brick walls. You may find you need to need to have a ranking before many sites will take you seriously.

Another way to increase your link campaign is to look at the Directories. These are sites with masses of links but they do not tend to get much direct traffic. Their value to you is in how the search engines will evaluate your links there. Firstly though you need to make sure that the search engines actually visit and index these places especially if you are paying for the placement of your links.

You can do this by searching Googles cache.
Googles cache is a temporary files folder that gives you solid proof that Google has visited a site.
Type in cache followed by a colon followed by the url of the webpage are searching for.
If you do this and find the site in a Directory is not in Googles cache it means that the site has not been spidered.

You can also scroll over some of the links in the Directory and view the status bar at the bottom. It should show you the domain name associated with the link. If this is not happening the particular Directory you are thinking of purchasing a position for your link in may not be the best place for you.
Providing a reciprocal link for the Directories is questionable too. Directories are there to list sites. Sites are not there to list directories. Personally I would stay clear of any reciprocal link exchanges with Directories.

The Open Directory Project is well worth your time. This is the largest, most comprehensive human edited Directory of the Web. It is also the only major directory that is FREE. You may also like to offer to contribute to the running of this resource by volunteering a small amount of your time

As with any of the Directories you will want to read their submission guidelines before you submit your link. Make sure you submit to the correct category and that you use a suitable description for your site. Just because a directory is free it does not mean they are obliged to accept your link.

If you have followed their guidelines your chances of being approved are much higher. Also Open Directory Project is syndicated by many other sites so your one link may provide your site with dozens of inbound links.
It can take a full 30 days for your site to be accepted so you will need to be patient. It is often best to do the best job you can of submitting your link then move onto your next project.

The Zeus Collective is a site that will help you locate other Link Directories.
When you type in your keywords the results will be a series of Link Directories. The sites in red are most relevant to your keywords. You can click onto these then go off and investigate the websites for link exchange possibilities.

Overall I think it is better to get your links in as many Directories as possible. If you have a keyword rich domain name and I hope you do, you will benefit more from being in the directories. Also it is important from a relevancy point of view that the anchor text of your links contains your keywords. For example if greeting cards is one of your keywords you may choose greeting cards or fine greeting cards or humorous greeting cards whatever is most appropriate for your business. You probably would not choose stationary and cards as your anchor text
It is also advisable to use some variation in your anchor text. Using the exact same anchor text everywhere may be seen as spamming even though you are not intending to spam.

It certainly is a lot of work but if you are serious about your links campaign, and you should be, you can cut a lot of corners by investing in software to help you.
Such software will also help you with future link campaign tasks. For example it may be harmful to your website if you are continuing to provide a home for your reciprocal links as agreed upon but for some reason the other party has decided to remove your links. If this happens and you are aware of it you can remove these links from your site. I like to send the site involved a polite email to let them know when I remove a link. It is just good manners and after all links are a reflection of relationships you have formed with other webmasters. Such intermittent checking is a very good idea. Software is available to help you reduce your checking time and allow you to move on to other tasks.

If you have some spare cash and you are in a bit of a hurry you may decide to buy or rent a link position on a high-ranking site. This can get quiet expensive but in some cases it can be helpful to give your site a bit of a boost for a month or two while your working on all the other areas we discussed. It may make it possible for you to temporarily improve your rankings so you are in a better position to discuss free link exchange with sites requiring higher ranking website link exchange.

A major part of the reasoning behind the links system is so people using the World Wide Web will be given the most relevant websites for the search terms they are using rather than the websites owned by the people with the most money. The more links you have the more relevant you will appear. Overall getting lots of relevant incoming links from relevant sites is very important to your Internet home business success.

Article Source: http://www.articlesinsight.com

Sarah is a Success University student. Improve your link strategies by reading the free SEO Elite Ebook 7 Days To Complete Search Engine Optimisation available at her website www.Successful-Home-Business-Connection.com/art4.html

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