Slowly but surely, links are where the traffic is!

Link popularity and link relevancy, have become the most important factors in determining whether you show up on page 1 or page 1,000 of the search results.

Requesting links is tedious, boring, and too closely resembles work! But you have to do it… if you want to get any traffic from the search engines, that is.

Stay away from the shortcuts on this one because they’ll cause you more harm than good. Spend the time finding sites that have a lot of links pointing to them and that get a great deal of traffic.

Each time you convince a decent site to link to your website, you stand to gain more visitors to your site, as well as a nice boost in the ranking of your site on the search engines.

As more and more sites link to you, you’ll see your search engine traffic start to increase because they will view your site as being more important.

Think about it: What if every site that links to you sends you 10 visitors per day. Find just 10 of those and you’ve picked up another 100 visitors per day…FREE!

Burn a little midnight oil and get that number up to 100 sites, and you now have 1,000 visitors a day sifting through your site!

Keep in mind that some links won’t bring you any traffic at all, and others will send one here, and one there. But these add up over time, so don’t dismiss a site because you don’t think you’ll get thousands of visitors from it.

Another reason I stress finding your own link partners rather than using some of the “5,000 links a day” programs is that the latest search engine trends are to rank the sites that link to you.

It’s not the quantity, but the quality that counts!

This means that 10 sites that have 100 sites linking to each of them is better than 100 sites with only 10 sites linking to them.

Basically, the search engines give a higher weighting to sites that link to you that are also popular themselves. There are many more factors in determining the popularity of a site, but you can typically use this as a good rule of thumb when searching out partners.

This makes sense because if an important site likes your site enough to link to it, then the search engines will like it too.

This is called Link Relevance, or Link Importance. Where Link Popularity merely counts the number of incoming links to your website, Link Relevance attempts to actually rank each of those sites that are linking to you.

By the way, the best tool I’ve seen out there for finding important sites to request links from (those that have many incoming links to them), is called Internet Success Spider by Neil Shearing.

You can either choose to enter in the URL of a popular site, or enter in search keywords that your target audience would search for. When the Spider is finished crunching, it will give you a list of sites, sorted by number of incoming links, that you can then contact and request a link from.

This can save you many, many hours of wasted time requesting links from lesser important sites, and allows you to focus on only the ones that will increase your website’s link relevance. You’ll also stand a good chance of getting a quite a bit of traffic through from these sites.

Internet Success Spider can save you a ton of time and allow you to build partnerships that can be worth many, many thousands of dollars.

I’ve used it to find a number of great affiliates for my affiliate program. In fact, one wonderful lady I discovered using the Spider software jumped onto my top 10 affiliates list in less than a week after I contacted her!

Use it to find out what sites are linking to your competitors, or that link to high ranking sites, and then contact them to see if they will link to yours as well.

Create some mini sites

An inexpensive and not-too-time-consuming option is to create several mini sites, and link them to your main site.

Mini sites are great at getting top rankings on the search engines because they are typically very focused on a particular topic, which the search engines like.

If you spend some time learning the steps to creating successful mini sites, you can get a quite a bit of traffic from them, while also increasing the link popularity of your main site.

The best resource by far on this subject is Phil Wiley’s “Mini Site Profits” ebook. If you understand the profit potential of mini sites, you’ll make sure you have Phil’s ebook in your library!

Setup a few of these sites and you can quickly start to see a large increase in traffic to your website, as well as more sales from the targeted visitors. (The extra sales should easily cover the small expense of Phil’s ebook)

A little creativity goes a long way

There are many different strategies that you can use to get more links to your website. In fact, i can recommend one of the ebooks named Website Traffic System with the topic “131 Link Building Strategies”.

I highly recommend that you put some effort into this because nothing else you do will give you as much long term rewards for your time.

One thing that I learned (another one of those “Why didn’t I do this earlier!”) is that for some sites it works better if you create a graphic of some sort for others to link to you with. I had always offered up a text link to people that added their affiliate program to my directory.

I rarely received links this way! I know that you would think people wouldn’t want a graphic on their site, but I found that when I created a few graphics and then told them they could use the graphic to link to me, the number of sites linking to me increased very quickly!

This may not work for your type of site, but I give this as an example to show you that you need to keep an open mind and be willing to try different methods.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting lots of links!

Every page on your website needs

Every single page on your website must be optimized for the search engines. This means every page needs:

1) Page Title
2) Meta Tags
3) Keywords in Header tags
4) ALT tags on all images
5) Keyword-filled content
6) Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible
7) Keywords in links to other pages
8) Keywords in outbound links

Page Title

Most search engines will use this as part of the information that is displayed when your site shows up in search results.

It is also important in the determination of what a particular page is about. For this reason you should make sure to put keywords in your page title, and preferably at the beginning of the title.

For example, for my AffiliateMatch.com website, my page title is:

Affiliate Programs Directory - AffiliateMatch.com

This helps my site to rank well for searches on “affiliate” or “affiliate programs” or “affiliate programs directory.”

Make sure you put in your most important keywords that you found in the previous article, and try to position them at the beginning.

It is not always possible to put them at the beginning and still be readable, but will definitely help if you are able to do this.

Meta Tags

These things become less and less important as time goes by.

At this point I don’t believe very many search engines even look at Meta Tags anymore, but since they are easy enough to setup, and because some engines do use them, it can’t hurt.

For the search engines that no longer use them, they just ignore them, so it won’t hurt you to have them on your pages.

You can find a Meta Tag Generator easily on the Internet. Just do a search in Google or Yahoo for that keyword. Simply enter your keywords and description and it will create them for you. Just copy and paste that into your page and you are set.

Keywords in Header tags

This means creating a heading for each page that contains the keywords you are targeting on that specific page. For example, if you want to target “search engines”, create a heading with the following code:

<h1>Search Engines</h1>

To your visitors, this would look like:

Search Engines

If that is too large for your particular page, you can also go with <h2> and <h3> tags instead.

To the search engines, this would be considered an important keyword phrase for that page.

The search engine would then compare that to the rest of the text found on the page and use all of this to determine the most important keywords for that particular page.

Make sure you do this on every page of your website!

ALT tags on all images

Another tip is to make sure every image on each page of your website has the ALT attribute. You want to put keywords in these. Don’t overdo this, but use them as an additional place to plug in a few keywords.

The way this looks is:

<img src=”/images/someimage.gif” alt=”search engines”>

In this example, I’d be adding a little more weighting for the phrase: “search engines”.

The actual purpose for this tag is to display text for those that surf with images turned off, or when you move your mouse over an image this text is what will popup.

Somebody along the line figured out you could stuff keywords in there because some search engines use the information in the alt tags for keyword relevancy calculations as well.

Keyword-filled content

You really can’t get away from this one. The more content-filled pages your website has, the better.

The fact is that they like lots of relevant, keyword-filled content. The more they can find, the happier they (and you) will be.

The best way that I have found to do this is with articles.

Articles can be reused in so many different ways, and they add excellent search engine bait for your website.

In later articles I’ll give you some great ideas for using articles as an important part of your traffic-building strategy.

Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible

This is my favorite, and I only wish I would have figured it out sooner! What this entails is very simply making sure you have the keywords you are targeting with a particular page as high up in the code for that page as possible.

To see this, open your web page with Notepad and look through all the gibberish … Title, Meta Tags, all that junk and look for the very first words that would be visible to someone reading your page.

The absolute first words need to be keywords!

As an example, take a look at my AffiliateMatch website by clicking here. Once that window opens up, go to the View Menu in your browser, and then Source. This is the actual code that makes up this page, and is also what the search engines see.

After you wade through all the gobbledygook, you’ll get to the text that visitors will actually see. In this graphic I’ve highlighted the first two words:

Even though there is a ton of junk above that, the search engines know that these are the first ‘visible’ words on this page.

The very first words for this page are affiliate programs. That’s the phrase I’m targeting.

Go to Google.com and type in affiliate programs and see what site is number one, and you’ll see how well this works.

When I first discovered this I actually redesigned this particular website to make sure I put those words at the top like that.

Before this I had a menu on the left that actually was higher up in the code of the page.

The problem was that I had text in there too, like: “Signup for my newsletter!” and things like that. This greatly affected my rankings.

After redesigning my site to allow me to put keywords higher up in the code, I quickly started seeing it rise in the rankings.

If your present design doesn’t allow for this, you might want to give some thought to either having only graphics in the menu, or redesigning it.

The idea for having more graphics is that these will be overlooked by the search engines as they search for the first ‘visible’ text on the page.

Keywords in links to other pages

Make sure when you have links to other pages on your site, or to other websites, that you use your keywords in the link.

For example, if you are targeting “search engines” on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site, and in the link call it: search engine listings.

The page the link points to can simply be a list of the most popular search engines.

Here is the same screen shot of the source code from my AffiliateMatch website so you can see an example of this, but this time I’ve highlighted it so you can see that the first two words that I showed you above are also part of a link:

Search engines will use the text from your links as another determining factor as to what your page is about, and also what the page you are linking to is about.

In this example you’ll notice that I’ve also bolded these words to give even more emphasis to them and make them look more important to the search engines.

I highly recommend that you combine the methods mentioned on this page whenever possible. For example, the first words on your page could be included in a header tag and be a link pointing to another page on your site.

Combining them in this manner can greatly increase your chances of getting great rankings.

Keywords in outbound links

This is the same as the last one, except this refers to using keywords in the links to other sites.

Again, if you are talking about search engines on a page, and link to someone else’s site for an article on search engine positioning, put “search engine positioning” in the actual link so it looks like:

search engine positioning

The alternative that many people use, but that doesn’t help their search engine ranking any, is to just show the website address like:

www.joeshomepages.com/~redy4u/search.htm

This doesn’t help either of you very much … at least not as far as search engines are concerned.

Whenever you are putting together a page to add to your website, fire up this page and incorporate as many of these steps as possible.