Get thousands of links to your site
You may already be aware that links are probably the most important factor to getting number one rankings on the search engines. However there is something that most people forget when trying to get links:
It's not just the quantity, but the quality of the links which is important.
Basically, "link farms" where there are thousands of unrelated links, do not work any more. It won't hurt your site if you have a link FROM a link farm. HOWEVER, if you link to a link farm your site can be severely penalized, especially with Google. This is a crucial point: If you link to poor quality sites, search engines such as Google will penalize your site and you will get a poor search engine ranking.
How to find good sites to link to you
So, you need to find good quality sites, how do you do it? Well, there are a few different ways. There is actually some software which will do it for you, also called the Spiders, which is the same software you can use to find "websites", "email addresses" etc. Click here for more info on Internet Success.
Good quality sites are going to have high search engine rankings. So, what you can do is simply to search for the top 100 ranking sites on Google, or other search engines, for the keyword that you are interested in. For example, if your site sells hosting & domains, then you search for "web hosting provider" and "cheap domain names" or "website hosting" and find the top 100 sites for each of these keywords.
How to get the sites to link to you
Offer an incentive
If your product has an affiliate program, then you simply suggest that they promote your affiliate program on their site, and they will be able to get a commission for each sale for people coming from their site. Alternatively you can advertise on their site and pay a fixed fee.
Another type of incentive is to offer your product for free, or offer free advertising for their site on your site. There are several alternative ways to do this.
A great way to Get the links for free
Firstly, look at the site and carefully determine if your product or site fits with the topic of their site. If it does, look for the best place for them to have a link to your site. Then, put a link to their site on your site - do this before they even put a link to your site.
Next you need to email them. Tell the site owner that you have put a link to their site (show them the page where you have put a link, and make sure it is a quality link). Then tell the owner why it will benefit their visitors to have a link to your site. Lastly, give an example of exactly where you suggest the link should be on their site, and an example of the wording that they could use. This makes it really easy for them to link to you.
The potential problem with method 2 is that it can take a lot of time to find the best sites to link to you. There is some software and scripts available for free to use on many seo related websites which can do it for you.
Other resources to help you
Before you even start doing all of this you should check and see how many links are already pointing to your site. Other things that will dramatically increase your chances of getting "linked to" are:
- Try faxing or phoning Website owners. Faxes receive a lot more attention than emails.
- Make sure that your email (or fax) is individualized, and states the benefits for their site and their visitors.
- Make sure that your site has good quality content that people are going to want to link to.
- Make the email (or fax) personal.
- Use the webmaster's name if you can find it.If the webmaster doesn't respond to your first email, try emailing again a week later as a gentle reminder. This can often work well.
- Use a database to keep track of who you have emailed and their responses.
- Create a template email that you can use to save time BUT don't send the same email to everyone, make sure that you individualize.