There are two very good reasons to solicit other web sites to link back to your web site. The first is that you may gain a little bit more click through traffic from those sites that are linked to yours. The second is that Google factors in your web site’s link popularity with your site’s relevancy in the search engine results.

Link popularity is simply the number of sites or pages linking to your web site. You can see this represented with Google by typing in the search box link: www.yourwebsite.com

Where “yourwebsite” is your domain name to your web site. The results will show how many sites or pages have links back to your site.

If you have access to web site statistics you would be looking for referring URLs (uniform resource locator) also known as web site addresses. The server where you have your web site hosted has log files where these results are recorded.

In order to get links coming back to your site you need to option your sphere of influence. Anyone you know that has a web site is a great start. Ask them if they would consider putting a link on their web site to link back to yours. You can sweeten the deal by having a link page set up for link swapping with other web sites. We call this “Reciprocol Linking”. With a prominent link page established you could email or call targeted web owners and ask if they would be interested in swapping links. If it makes sense to do so you will have new inbound link to your site.

Personally I think you should be choosy about the web sites that you swap links with and I would name this link page or pages with names that sell the page. Some ideas for link page names might be “Important Resources” , “Community of Responsible Businesses” or a page of “Associated Affiliations”.

You may come across web advertisements for online link swapping software but, beware you will be pounded with casinos, pharmaceuticals and adult sites rapidly. These types of links will not add credibility to your web site.

There is another way to get links to your site outside of web site owners that you know and that is to hand submit your web site to guides and directories. There are hundreds of them. Some are free and some are fee-based. I would try the free ones first. The reason you should consider the fee-based ones are because they have good page rank. Google also puts a value on the quality of the links you have coming back to your site. Highly ranked web site links to your site will have more impact on search engine relevancy than those links from poorly ranked web sites.

You can get the PR (Page Rank) on any site by going to: www.prchecker.info or just go to www.sitemechanix.com we have a PR checker installed on our home page near the bottom. Just type in the web address. A PR of 4 is good but 5 is better. The top most page rank is 10 but you will only find one of those, Google, and it is because it is their system.

To find these directories you will need to do a search for “business directories” or perhaps something specific to your industry but make sure you include the word “directory” in your search. Be careful of the word “free”. While there are some good free directories to submit to there are also a bunch that are phooney and may have nasty scripts embedded in their sites that could harm your computer if you are not adequately protected.

When pursuing links from directory sites it is best to be prepared. I generate a profile for the site I’m getting links for and it helps me stay consistent with special key words for my links. Links are text-based so targeting special key words in your link text is important. Most likely the link text will be the “Title” for your listing. You will also need to be prepared for a brief description of your site and about 10 key words for your link. I also include in this profile contact information but, I do not give them an important email address. I will make up an alias like frank@mywebsite.com (mywebsite would be replaced with your own domain name) because you will get tons of junk email. They will also require that you confirm your email as well as your intended listing.

Your friendly web master should be able to help you with this otherwise call on SiteMechanix.com for a consultation.

Karl Knelson - Site Mechanix, LLC
Web Development and Web Consulting