Marketing

 by: Andrew Hansen

Any internet marketer will tell you about the importance of your ‘linking strategy’ in getting your website indexed and ranking highly in the search engines.

In the past reciprocal links were all the rage. People were (and still are) trying to get sites with high rankings to link back to their site to show search engines that their site is of greater importance. To do this they were putting links up on their sites, ie You link to my site and I’ll link to yours. This was a strategy that worked well.

However, it was always hard to find linking partners. Sure there was software to help, you could hire people and spend your own time sending emails but ultimately, sites that are ranked highly don’t usually want to link back to your site because there’s nothing in it for them! And you can always use directories but they usually won’t provide you with a link that is relevant enough in the eyes of the search engines to significantly improve your ranking.

Furthermore the reciprocal linking theory has changed somewhat in the eyes of the search engines in the past few months. We can only speculate as to why but it has occurred that reciprocal links are given less weight in comparison to one way back links from other sites. Perhaps this is because an inbound link will seem more natural if it doesn’t exist only because of a link that you have put up to the linkers site. Anyway we could guess forever but the result is that reciprocal linking is dying.

The big question then is “What do we do instead”?

Get as many one way back links as you can! How do you do that? Well I’m sure that there are many ways but here is one way that I’ve been using successfully.

You’ve probably heard people raving about blogs. These days everyone has one, everyone is making them and everyone who doesn’t, WANTS TO.

Now, there are people who own ‘blog farms’ which are large numbers of blogs in a network that are controlled by a central system. On a small scale what I do is post a link to my site on other peoples blogs, either with a sig file or with a link in my post. Now you probably realise that it’s going to take a long time to make hundreds of posts with your link to hundreds of blogs and you’re right. But there is a faster way!

There are people who run services of blog farms who will give you the ability to post your link to the hundreds of blogs that they own. Do you know what this means? This means you can instantly receive hundreds of backlinks from other (generally high ranking blog) websites, to get indexed in the search engines in record time, improve your sites rankings, and receive a barrage of traffic with almost NO EFFORT!

Doesn’t get much easier than that!