Get Your Link On Top of Yahoo!

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 is to do a simple search to find websites with
information about the same subject as your site, or closely
related information. If you have a website about footware ,
for instance, you can use search terms such as "footware",
"shoes", "loafers", "running shoes", and "sandals" to
find sites which may be interested in linking to yours.

Or, you can take another route. Just identify a related site
which is highly popular, and find the websites which link to
it. You can do that with a search in Google or
alltheweb.com for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and
the complete URL of the popular website. For example,
link:http://www.example.com (and don't forget
the colon after the word "link"). There are also software
programs which can search for appropriate websites
automatically.

Once you have found these websites; the websites most likely
to link to yours, go to them, cut and paste the email
addresses of their webmasters, and request a link. An email
which is polite, well written, and summarizes the content of
your website will help you achieve the best results.

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 on your site.

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 an average of at least ten webmasters a day, more if
you have the time. With just a ten percent success rate,
that will net you a minimum of thirty new links a month.

If you follow this advice, you should experience an almost
immediate, albeit modest, increase in visitors to your
website. However, the biggest benefit of a good linking
campaign, higher search engine rankings, will take a bit
longer. There is no magic formula, and there are lots of
variables, but your search engine ranking could improve in
as little as a few weeks, and should continue to improve as
time goes on and more sites link to you as both a direct
result of your efforts and webmasters seeing your links on
other sites