Directory Submission

You can get your site listing on multiple site directories that exist out on the internet, just type in “directory submission” into your search engine and you will find this. The way this works is you put your category within the directory and get your site listed within the directory. Each link will count as a backlink to your site which is what you will want. Think of this as trading links with webmasters except these links do not carry as much weight as a link from a site that is heavily optimized for their relevant keywords.

Article and Press Release submission

This is utilizing the same idea as obtaining backlinks from web directories, except these article sites carry a litte bit more weight because you will be targeting article submission sites that are within the same topic threshold that you are working in. At the end of your articles you will want to place a link back to the address of the article on your site at the credits section, this is to avoid your articles from being tagged as duplicate content and thus lowering your site’s value within the search rankings.

Trading direct links
How to get webmasters to link to you

You help me, I help you

If you run into a site that is just starting off but looks promising in terms of future popularity, then you should definitely contact the webmaster of the site to request a reciprocal link trade. More than likely the owner of the site will be more than willing to trade links at no cost than link real estate.

Free link based on content value

If you create captivating content and they link to you as a result, you can call this free publicity. If you can leverage your content as something unique, interesting or entertaining and get your competition to link to you unknowningly, then this my friend is golden.

Paying for placement

If you are running site in a similar category like an online game and want to have a big time site link to you for no reason, then they might charge you for link placement, if you are paying for link placement, make sure you get a link on a page that has less than 15 other links. otherwise the value of the link will be pretty low when weighted against the number of other links on the page.

However, if you don’t want to have to pay top dollar for a link from a big site then you might want to target smaller sites that will offer it for a considerably lower cost to sometimes even free, this way you can get multiple smaller sites who have good keyword ranking related to your topic linking to you at about a fraction of what it would’ve cost to advertise on the “larger” site.

Trading indirect links

This only works if you have multiple sites built up with good search engine keyword ranking for the given topic, what you want to do is target sites that have good ranking through related keywords and ask for a backlink and in exchange you will link to them through one of your other sites, this way the process will seem more geniune and not seem like a “link-trade” used only for building ranking.

Message Boards

Target message boards that are within the same subject realm that your site is targeted towards, then post links to articles that you’ve written or tools that you’ve created to pre-existing topics on threads of that message board. Just don’t spam the message board. Your linking should come off as naturally entering the topic and never be intrusive if you wish to keep the backlink to your site.

Obtaining visitors through organic searches

What does this mean? Organic searching means that the visitors typed in keywords that were closely related to the keywords that you were targeting and stumbled upon your site through the results pages. For this to work you need to optimize your keywords by targeting specific keywords to your topic and then by doing a bit of research on your competitors, getting more links than them OR getting less links but with higher page ranking than the sum average of your competitor.

Buying ad space

Text ads and graphic ads

You will have to have banners or captivated text ads created for your site for the sole purpose of having other sites displaying these creatives on their site to drive more traffic, for a fee of course.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Web Design Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.