Get Other Websites with Topical Relevance to Link to You

No matter how much you optimize the content and META tags of your website to be search engine “friendly,” the best way to increase traffic to your website is to get “backlinks”- incoming links from other websites that link to yours. There are two reasons why:

1. The obvious reason is that the more pathways there are to find your site, the more people will find it.
2. The non-so-obvious reason is that the major search engines monitor how many links out there on the Web are pointed at your site. Consider the backlinks like votes. More links pointed at your site = More votes. The more votes you have, the more likely your site will rank high when someone is looking for your products or services on Google or Yahoo!.

Backlinks are not all the same variety, though. In other words, not all votes are equal. A link from a site that has a similar topic or related industry as yours has more value than a link that comes from an unrelated website.

I once helped develop a site for a law firm that wanted to put a link to one of the partner’s wife’s art gallery. I advised them that this would not help their search engine rankings, nor would it help out the site visitors who needed an attorney, but they wanted it anyway. The customer is always right, at least the paying ones.

The search engines not only want relevant sites to link to you, they want relevant sites to link to the relevant sites that link to you – a two-layer padding of security that there is some topical relevance involved in all of this backlinking.

One way to get backlinks is to trade them with other sites – “You link to me, and I’ll link to you.” There are a lot of people who are willing to do this, but make sure the links are from topically relevant sites or directories that have some geographical significance.

Also, make sure the site with which you trade links doesn’t have a lot of pop-up ads or pages that redirect to another page.

Make sure, too, that no links are bought or sold – this is penalized by Google.

Link exchanges are good, but one-way links to your site are better. One way to actively create one-way links is to find blogs that are relevant to your website and leave comments that include a single link to your site. Do not abuse this, however, and do not spend too much time doing it – the blog’s webmaster can set it up so your backlinks hold no value. Besides, there are no guaranteed metrics for this process, and the amount of time spent might be an opportunity cost wasted.

In the next article I will discuss how to make your links better with what is known as “anchor text.”

Contact me if you want your site to perform better in Search Engine Results Pages. I can provide you with ways of driving more traffic to your site as well as ways of measuring the ROI of these procedures.

If you prefer to learn more on your own, you will be interested in buying Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.