When you’re aiming to make money online, links are important. Websites rank in search engines partially according to how many links are pointing to the site.
Linking can build strength for your website’s relevancy and reputation online and can drive traffic as well as search engines to your site both from search engine results and from people clicking on the various links in cyberspace. If you have others linking to you, this is looked upon favourably by search engines like Google so finding several ways to get more links is a good idea.
How do you get others to link to you? One way to do that is to link to them first. Consider the following Linking Strategies to get more links to your site. Some of these strategies require a little bit of effort and others link to you as a by-product of the action you take.
1. The Blogroll
When you link to someone else in your blogroll*, they’re likely to notice eventually either because they’re checking their site stats and can see that someone is linking to them or because they notice they have traffic coming to their website from your site. They may reciprocate.
If the niche is somewhat related to your niche, this can be especially helpful. If they do, search engines notice and their site visitors might visit you as well. Don’t hesitate to ask for blogroll sharing once you’ve built somewhat of a rapport with someone online as well.
* The ‘Blogroll’ is a linking area in your blog sidebar.
2. Social Media
Social link love is another great way to get noticed by search engines and people. When you link to others, they will often thank you by linking something for you as well. If you join Digg, for instance, you can send ‘shouts’ to people and ask them to help you make your post go viral. Tell them you’ll reciprocate their shouts and make sure you do.
When you see a great post on someone’s blog, give it some link love with social bookmarking tools and if they follow your live stream, they’ll probably notice and look for something of yours to return the favour with.
If you write a great blog post, people might just link to you because they want others to see your post. This is a great thing! If you develop a friendship circle with others in your online network you can organise this as well and create a bit of a linking circle of friends.
3. Guest Posts
If you want some link love from a particular website that has good standings online, ask if you can post a guest post. This gives you an opportunity to say what you want to say about your site or your topic of choice and link back to your own website.
Site owners are often content hungry so write a great article and they’ll probably consider it.
4. Article Directories
There are a lot of article directories that will let you link to your own site(s) in articles that you submit and by granting reprint rights on these sites (some sites require automatic reprint rights and others will ask you to specify what type of rights you are granting when you publish) you allow other people to publish your article in exchange for keeping your links in tact. They are giving you keyword anchored links in return for you letting them publish your article on their site.
You can link sites, hosted blogs, free blogs, and free pages in many of these sites. While you can’t typically put in an affiliate link you can lead the search engine and the viewer to a page that will later point to an affiliate link so this can be helpful.
5. Pingbacks
Find interesting blogs and create a post on your site that links to them. Some blogs will link back to your post in return either automatically through pingbacks or will do so to acknowledge the link which is like thanking you for the favour.
A lot of sites allow do-follow links on them which means that when you comment and list your site, that blog will show a backlink to your site which is followed by search engines. This isn’t always allowed due to abuse of this type of link known as a sping (spam / ping) so your efforts may or may not be noticed.
As you can see there are a lot of creative Linking Strategies available for you to use. By being a sociable online citizen who networks in your niche, you’re likely to find others striving for the same goals and others who are willing to return linking and social bookmarking favours.
