Site Partners & Links To Your Site

It seems pretty obvious that you'd want to have as many sites linking to yours as possible but doing this can be pretty time consuming and many site owners forget this important step. But by getting other sites to link to your site, you are increasing your web traffic two-fold: First, from the sites themselves and secondly, from the increased search engine ranking that you'll get. Search engines will give your website high marks for having other relevant sites linking to yours. Any links to your site won't hurt you but relevant ones are definitely better. And of course being listed in different search engines will help you out too - after all, those are links to your site too!

The Good Stuff - Recommendations

Getting other sites to legitimately link to your site and to have them consider your site as valuable link should be your primary goal. This means that you have to have a good site, that people would actually want to link to! It's always good to have a prominent link from their home page but it is also good to get them to link to your site within their content. By recommending your site on theirs, they are driving traffic to your site and conversely (if you have a good site), you make them look good. This is the best kind of link to your site but also the most difficult to get since they need to really like your site.

So how do you get this kind of link? Contact the owner of the other site. Tell them about your site, what you offer, how you complement their site, product, and/or services. If you find their site equally rewarding, add a link on your site to theirs and let them know that you did so. From selfpromotion.com:

If you really, honestly think that the site you just linked to would similarly be improved if it had a link to your site, then email the site owner and suggest it. Tell him that you have linked to his site, and that regardless of what he decides, you will continue to do so, because you think his site is useful.

Link Exchanges

Google ranks pages not just on their content but on their link popularity. As I've discussed in the previous paragraphs, you want other sites to link to you. There are some sites that will facilate finding other sites that have relevant content and will link back to you and automate a lot of the process. Some of these sites are free and others are not. I've included some free sites below that I use. The way it generally works is that you sign up with these sites, enter information about your site, and then get started. You'll have to put links on your site linking back to the sites you're exchanging links with, and I recommend that you create a new page dedicated to these link partners, and link to it from your home page.

• Link Market - This site has a great directory and automated process.
• 123 Exchange Links
• The Link Exchange
• Free Relevant Links - Requires a separate server-side page.

Also, I've heard that SiteSell is also a good solution but I haven't signed up yet...

As you build a good network of links to your site, keep the inbound and outbound links relevant!

Next step: Google AdWords & PPC