Link Building: The Key to a Full Time Income Online

The very best way to raise your search engine rankings and bring more visitors to your website is to get other websites to link to yours. Engaging in a linking campaign is without cost, and it is not a complicated undertaking, but it does require some time, some energy, and the willingness to persevere. There are two ways to get started.

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.college-scholarships.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’ve located the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their webmasters, and send an email requesting a link. To be effective, your email must be brief, well written, and polite, and describe your site in no more than 25-30 words.

The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster’s visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. Be persuasive but avoid hyperbole.

You can also offer the webmaster something in return. For example:

a. a link from your site to theirs.

b. useful information . I’ve responded to emails offering to direct me to websites with articles on website promotion techniques.

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.

You should begin seeing a marginal increase in visits to your website very soon after you start link building. But, your big benefit will kick in weeks later, as the links to your site are discovered by the search engines and your search engine rankings begin to climb on Google and Yahoo. Remember, organic search engine traffic is the best converting, most valuable traffic you can have.

Keep at it and, all things being equal, you can obtain the kind of search engine rankings which can transform your website from a hobby (as my wife originally referred to my first site) to a site which gets enough traffic to provide you with a meaningful income.