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!