Drive traffic to your site with links
By Matt Hodkinson
Any Mom who runs their own e-business, or markets their home-based business on the web, would do well to review their linking strategy in order to boost site traffic, as more people visiting your site translates into more cash entering the accounts!
It’s important to consider the types of links available to you, and then exploit them! Anchor text and internal links, used in your page content, can not only improve the navigation and usability of your site, but will also help the search engines to crawl your pages. Be sure to place links on keywords, favoured by the search engines, as opposed to “click here” or similarly non-relevant text.
Outbound links are generally one-way, outgoing links to a separate site. If you plan to include outgoing links, it is important that the site is relevant to your target audience and subject matter, and has a good page rank with search engines. If this is the case, it would be very wise to try for a return, or “reciprocal” link back to your site from theirs.
Use caution when choosing external linked sites though, as link farms and bogus directories are great in number, and are generally frowned upon by search engines such as Google. Your ranking may suffer if you are associated with these sites. Be sure to choose your linked sites wisely and ensure that they use keyword links. Also try to avoid getting placed on a generic “Links” page.
Some great applications are available on the web, which will aid the time-consuming process of gathering inbound links to your site. Check out SEO Elite, which takes the pain out of generating high-quality links, and many have found to be a great tool for ranking highly and quickly with all the top search engines.
Reciprocal links should always be considered a short-term approach to help you rank well on search engines in the early stages of your e-business career. Once you start getting traffic to your site, and by offering high-quality content, you will soon grow “organic” links without half the effort, due to webmasters and other “surfers” recommending your site on their pages, and in forums and blogs.
Inbound links are the major driver for getting your site ranked well in the top search engines, and one of the easiest ways to get hundreds of inbound links is to write articles.
There are a host of article submission sites on the web, ready to offer your article to anyone and everyone. Write something relevant to your site, fill it with keywords, and keep it to a readable 400 to 600 words. When you submit to sites like e-zine articles you can include a link to your site in the “About the author” box. Every time someone adds your article to their site or blog, you’ve got another inbound link! What did it cost you? About an hour of your time …not a bad return!
Be sure to check spelling and grammar before submitting your articles, and to maximise your article writing potential, you may want to invest in an article submission tool, such as the Article Submission Wizard.
In summary, site linking forms an important part of your mom home-based business or e-business, by driving traffic to your site from many sources and building trust with search engines. Use the techniques here, and you should see healthy increases in traffic to your site.
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