Link Requests
So now that you understand the importance of building links
to your site, you are probably wondering how to get started.
After all, it's not like you can just ask people to link to
your site...or can you? Most webmasters are quite open to
linking to other sites, especially if you offer to link to
them in return. This is called "reciprocal linking."
The best way to go about building reciprocal links is to find
sites that you feel are worth linking with, add a link to
their site on your own, and then drop them a polite email
explaining how you found them, why you linked to them, where
the link can be viewed, and offering your own link information
in case they would like to return the favor.
When requesting a link, it's generally a good idea to let
a web site owner know how you would like the link to read.
Since search engines give extra weight to words contained
within anchor (link) text, a text based link will serve you
better in the long run than a linked URL. For example, Article
on Keyword will have much more impact on your rankings than
http://www.domain.com will.
Building non-reciprocal incoming links is another way to
increase your link popularity. Often times, there will be
smaller, topical or regional directories or informational
sites that will be happy to link to your site, whether you
link back to them or not. If your site contains a strong amount
of informational, rather than commercial content, you have
a much higher likelihood of being able to build this type
of link. Requesting links isn't difficult, it simply takes
some time.
Finding the sites that you wish to have link to you can take
a little more time, but there are still several tried and
true methods for locating promising sites. The best place
to get started is in one of the popular directories like Yahoo!
or DMOZ. Browse through the categories until you come to the
one that is most appropriate to the content on your web site.
Often, you will find a listing of directories or portal sites
that you can visit one at a time and request links from.
Another great method for finding sites that might be willing
to link to you, is to find out who is linking to your competitors.
There are several ways to do this. The easiest is to run a
search for your most important keyword phrases on a search
engine like Google and write down the URLs of the sites that
rank well. Once you have a decent list built up, you can use
what is known as an "advanced operator" (query words
that have special meaning to a search engine) to help you
look up a site's incoming links. On Google, the operator is
"link:" To look up the list of sites that Google
records as linking to a particular site, you would type the
following into the search box:
link:www.domain.com
There are several online tools that will search multiple
search engines at once and then provide you with a list of
links to a particular site as recorded by all of them. The
most popular of these is the Link Popularity Checker at MarketLeap.
This tool will search the incoming links recorded by AlltheWeb,
AltaVista, Google, Inktomi and MSN for up to four different
web sites at once.
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