Improve Link Popularity

 How to  Increase Quality Links to your site? 

Don't buy links or trade links from sites you don't know. Links to your site plays an important role but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of links. A link from a site which is related to yours is more valuable than 20 links from unrelated sites. Learn these good Link Building Techniques:

 1) Submit your site to FFA pages 

A common misconception among many Internet marketers is that while FFA (Free For All) pages may not directly bring in traffic to your site, it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, and hence, will indirectly bring in traffic through the search engines. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a time. This means that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed. My opinion is that these FFA pages aren't effective than the following techniques. So you can skip this method if you want.

 2) Give Freebies, Gifts and Awards. 

A slightly effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is giving away free stuffs like magazines, small electronics, T-shirts with your site's logo and many others. Start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award which is linked to your site.

 3) Giving testimonials 

Giving testimonials for products or services which you find useful can be another effective way of improving the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along with the testimonial. Limit it to related companies only.

 4) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists 

Post to online message boards but don't do it on unrelated message boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts.

 5) Starting a Link Contest 

A good method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell a software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners.

 6) Publishing Articles 

Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. If you write good articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your products or services. Write a very good article OR you can publish other's article but mention their name and the source you copied from. While you do so, insert 1 or 2 links to your site and publish the articles to free directories. Some of the well known article directories for good traffic are as follows:

submit it to the following article submission sites:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml

http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm

 7) Submitting to the directories 

This is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo! currently requires a payment of $299 per year in order to list any commercial site. But, the Open Directory is free, and you should definitely get your site listed in the Open Directory.

 8) Exchanging links with other webmasters 

The single-most effective way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not direct competitors. This is called reciprocal linking. You need to use the search engines to find sites related to yours that are not direct competitors by typing in some keywords that are related to your site.You then need to manually add a link to this site in your site. Then, you need to find out the email address of the owner of the website and send the owner a personalized email requesting that he/she adds a link to your site in return. If the site is not willing to link to you, you need to remove the link to the site from your site

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