There are a number of thoughts about what are the best ways to promote a website and about the best ways to attract more visitors to a website. In my opinion, it is vital to start up a link building campaign to increase the number of websites which have a link to your site on their site. This is one proven method which has been successful in achieving high rankings for many different sites, but there are some vital factors to keep in mind when attempting to build up this link network.

If you have a new site and are desperate to achieve top rankings on the top search engines such as google, reckon again. Most of these search engines will probably not give your new site a high ranking until it has become established. This is where the age of the domain is vital. You can not in reality expect to be placed in a higher search position than a site which has been around for eight years and which has been building up links, during this period. This is where patience is required, you should see your site as something which is going to be online for a long time and hopefully in time, some of the other sites that you are competing with will have dropped out etc.

This is the same attitude that should be applied when building up the number of backward links pointing to your site. Going from only a few, to a few thousand in a small space of time may not be the best thought. Regular increases are in my opinion the way to go and quality is just as vital as quantity. Choose the ways in which you are plotting to obtain your backward links and try to ensure that you obtain roughly the same amount each month, where possible of course. Over a long period of time this strategy is sure to pay dividends and your search engine position should steadily improve. You will then have an authority site, which all new sites will be aspiring to compete with. Like many areas of life we do not really want to wait for our success and want immediate rewards, such as high rankings. On some search engines this may be possible but on most it will require hard work and this type of patience.

The links that you obtain should where possible be from sites which are in a similar industry or subject matter, to your own site. This is a lot simpler said than done but. If your site is very well written, optimised and of use to a large number of people, you may well receive links on other sites without the need to request the link. This is of course exactly what you want and is why it is vital to spend time thinking of how your site is written and presented.

A excellent way of obtaining a link to your site is to write a reference or testimonial to owners of other sites with which you have had dealings with. Offer to write them this testimonial which of course will be of fantastic benefit to them, on the understanding that they will include a link back to your site at the bottom.

I personally concentrate on obtaining one-way links as I believe these to have the most value. One way I do this is by writing articles such as the one you are reading. There are a fantastic number of benefits of writing articles which can be read at most of the article directories such as ezinearticles. I would certainly recommend it to other people who are thinking of starting up a link building campaign.

Most sites contain links page – why? Well, the two vital reasons why a web developer must look into having a links page.

1. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is only one way of getting the search engines to pick up that you are there. Something else that you must not neglect if you want your website to be noticed is obtaining links.

2. Your website is offering a service to your visitors – links provide them with other sites of interest which they may want to visit. Although the retail industry might say they want people to stay on their site, rather than going anywhere else, carefully chosen links may be able to get people even more interested in the product you are selling! You may have to reckon laterally!

In the eyes of a search engine there certainly seem to be excellent links and terrible links. Excellent links will get you higher up the page rankings and onto the top of the listings, terrible links at best will be ignored and at worst could really could against you and your site be listed much lower.

- A excellent link is one from a site which has high relevance to yours, and which is has a excellent page rank.

- A terrible link is one from an obvious link farm, and has no contextual links to your sites.

Before we go further, lets talk a small bit about page rank. Page rank is the ranking that Google gives to website pages and shows their importance as Google sees it. The Google Toolbar, which can be obtained from http://toolbar.google.com for free, is a useful tool as it can show the page rank of any web page you are looking at. The page rank (or PR) of a site ranges from to 10 – is where you start, 10 would be exceptional! Although Google keeps the algorithms for working out PR very close to their chests, the progression through the numbers is probably on a logarithmic scale – that is, a site ranking 2 is many times more vital than that ranking 1, not just 1 point.

When you are link building you should be trying to get links to your site from sites with a higher page rank than yours. Links from sites with excellent PR will immediately signal to the search engines that yours is a site worth indexing! The more links the better!

So should you only link with sites with higher PR? Well, if everyone practised this the chances of you getting any links for your embryonic site would be zero! A site may be today, but that site may also be working hard to increase its rankings and you may benefit from their progress. Also, do remember your human visitors, a site may be useful to them, even if not for your purpose of increasing your rankings! So golden rules to remember:

- Aim to get links from high ranking pages

- Place up links from any site which has high relevance to yours.

First reckon of sites which it would be useful for your visitors to be able to go to from your site. For example, if you are a specialist site, are there some national organisations that promote your sport, leisure activity or industry? Your first step will be to email these organisations and question if you can have reciprocal links with them.

Now this may a small bit of a David and Goliath situation, and many people feel place off because they reckon their new immature website is far too small. You may not get any response to your emails, you may get a response refusing you, but you may find a national organisation with excellent page ranking agrees to link to you! Be very pleased with this!

Immediately someone agrees to have a reciprocal link with you, place up their link on your website – just in case they choose to check!

Now, reckon again about your customers or visitors – even if the huge organisations have refused to place a link to you on their site, it may still be useful to place a link to them on yours for your visitors’ information. Always remember the whole goal of getting website traffic is to get and keep loyal customers or visitors – not just to attract search engine bots!

Now the hard work starts. Search the web for sites on the same subject matter as yours, but which are obviously NOT competitors. Keeping an eye on the Google Toolbar look for sites which have a better page rank than yours – ideally the websites you are looking for will be ranked about 4 or 5 (higher ranking sites may be a bit snobbish towards novice sites).

What about people who supply goods and services to you – can they link to yours? What about customers? Try and reckon outside of the box here – if you have a sporting site how about a link to a local photographer?

Sometimes you can do excellent research away from the computer (yes, you can turn it off sometimes!). Trade magazines are often a excellent start – write to any email addresses and question for a reciprocal link. You may find even if they do not have a links page already they may choose to add one! It never hurts to question!

When you are looking at websites check that they have a links page. If they do you may find there is a form on which you can submit the details on your website asking to be added to their links page or a suggest site add new link button so that it is simple to add your site. You may need to email a website if they don’t seem to be canvassing links. Don’t be too place off if there isn’t a relevant category for them to list your site in – they can always add more categories. If you don’t question you don’t get! If you do question – you may well succeed!

So don’t be worried about emailing and asking for reciprocal links – but do make sure you place up the links you promise! This may lead you to reckon a small about your site – some people don’t want to have their link at the end of a very long page. You should consider rotating banners so you can show more links, but keep the page simple. You make also need to restrict non relevant links.

If you know your subject show it! And one of the best ways is to join a forum. When posting or answering a topic on the forum always use a signature with your website address on it – if the forum users like what they read about you they will click on the ljnk to visit your website, and hey presto – you have more links coming into your site! If your hosting company has a user forum, there may well be a section where you can showcase your new site – if so, you will get a number of visits through this. Lovely links for search engines and fodder for the link spiders!

Also, if you visit the Guestbook of a relevant site you can also leave your website address there. BUT PLEASE ONLY IF IT IS A RELEVANT SITE!

Article writing as a technique for building links and traffic is a less obvious area which a lot of people don’t know about or know.

Presumably you are an expert in your area – or at least have useful information to share with others. So write an article! Not sure if you can? Well, start with the content of your site as a basis – you may already find you have done the hard work. Can’t reckon of a subject? Well reckon laterally again. If you are selling artistic candles, for example, what about an article about the history of candle making? If you reckon hard enough there probably is something you can write about! You made need to do a small research, but articles will really help build your traffic and ranking. (And of course you can use them as content on your own site!)

Articles do not need to be lengthy – in fact shorter is better. Probably no more than 600 to 1000 words. What you want to do in your article is write about something related to your site.

Now there are a number of websites that you will publish your article for you. Other websites can use your article for free, but they HAVE to include the author details – which off course means your website details. People using your article will form links back to your site – the more different sites using it, the better the links!

Better still you can submit your article to any number of article sites. Ezine Articles is one of the largest, but any search on Google will reveal a number of others.

Now, no one can pretend that this is an simple activity – it does take time. No one is going to use your article if it is not well thought out and tells them something new. It must not be dull either. But article submission is a really brilliant way of improving your website’s position in the search engines, and should not be ignored.

Of course articles are also vital resources for Webmasters in another way – free content for your site! There are sites out there which cater for an incredible number of subjects, and in themselves can be very useful and informative! Free articles for web designing, for example, can bring you other hints and tips for making the best of your website.

If you use an article you must place on the full author’s bio and a link back to their site. But the benefit to you is ready made content hopefully keyword rich which will attract the search engine bots like bees to honey!

Web rings are another way of building links – again, check the page rank of the web ring you are joining. Web rings give you links, and also provide your human visitors with other sites of interest which they may wish to visit.

Let’s face it – website design and publishing is really a lot harder work that you probably first thought when you started designing your home page. But there is nothing more demoralising that having designed a wonderful site which you are extremely proud of – only to find you have no visitors at all!

You probably do want to spend all of your time fine tuning your existing pages, and putting up new ones, and anything which drags you away from this will be resented, but if you want a successful website link building is something which has to be done.

The best advice is to place one day a week aside for what we should call your marketing activities. Link building, along with SEO, are activities are extremely tedious. Build SEO into the way you construct your pages from the beginning (or in other words, consider not only the impact on the human eye as you design your page, but consider the spiders and bots at the same time!). And use your day a week to build links.

A tip from experienced developers in this area is not to aim to get hundreds of links in a small space of time – this will again make the search engines suspicious. Instead just aim to get one quality link at least once a month.

Website marketing is not a small sprint – it is more like a marathon. Many will start the race, but a large number will fall beside the wayside. But if you acknowledge it will be hard work and keep slogging away you will get to the end. There will come a time when you will receive a request from a reputable, well ranked website, asking for a reciprocal link from you! That may not be the end, but be assured that will give you a real buzz, and you will know then that most of your hard work will have been worth it!

Many new computer graduates come up with their own websites and launch it. But very few are aware of what does link building really mean. Many might have heard the term but still interpret it in the incorrect way and reckon that it means getting connected to other websites. Their interpretation misses the most vital word- relevance.

Relevant link building is the essence of a successful link building campaign and very few have got the intellect to really go ahead with it. For such reasons, numerous expert and adept professionals have come up in the online arena who now the A-Z of link building with all its importance and requirements. They not only complete your link building endeavor in an efficient and rapid mode, but also conduct it in the ethical seo way. They opt for various techniques since they know no single technique is fool proof. Thus they go for social bookmarking as well as manual directory submissions.

In both the techniques, they go with extra care so that at any moment of time, there is not a single step looking backward since there are thousands of new websites coming up everyday and so a cut throat competition is waiting for every one. All are desirous of getting their website the top position in indexing and more and more people visit their website. With professionals at service, this daunting task becomes simpler and simpler. You even get to learn a lot from them so that you can handle all things on your own later.

Link Popularity as you know plays a HUGE part in your websites ranking within the Search Engines.

So, the basic breakdown is, the more links pointing to your website, the higher up the search engines will rank your website.

More importantly though is getting those High PR websites linking back to yours.

The question at hand is… “How can I get those High PR links without having to buy High PR links and/or spend countless hours surfing the web for link partners with the possible potential of being denied?”

And as webmasters, we can not afford to waste time, especially if your starting out on a part time basis.

We must utilize every minute we can to getting the most out of our efforts.

So with that being said, I’m going to reveal to you the ‘Back Door’ strategy I use for getting those High PR links to your website Absolutely FREE and have them begging you to come back.

And the cool thing is this can be done following these 3 steps I’m about to mention so pay attention because if you do just this, you will not only get hundreds of backlinks to your website, you’ll also get hundreds, if not thousands of Targeted visitors to your website at the same time…

…all for FREE!

Are you ready?

Excellent, because I am.

Step #1. First you must write an Article.

The first step is to write an related article about your Product or Service that draws the reader in and gets them to click through to your website once they end reading it to find out more about you and your Product or Service.

Now, your probably wondering why you have to write an article.

Well, it’s real simple really because what do you get to place at the end of your article?

Your ‘Resource Box’ with your website information and most vital of all… your URL pointing back to your website.

So when someone chooses to publish your article in their newsletter or on their website, blog or article directory, they MUST add your ‘Resource Box’ with your website information and URL.

I know some of you are saying… “I don’t know how to write an article” … well, your not alone.

Here are a few resources I’ve place together for you so you can get the basic thought of How-To structure your articles with ease or get someone else to write them for you.

The first is an article I wrote called… THE 7 Step Formula For Writing POWERFUL Articles In Less Than An Hour.

It will show you How-To structure your articles for simple writing. http://www.internetwondersezine.com/article_11.html

The second resource is Elance.com – http://www.elance.com – which is basically a place where you can go and submit a project by category and freelance writers, etc. will then bid on your project. You pick the winner and you set the budget.

This will get you started in the right direction.

Remember, your article is the Nuts and Bolts of this ‘Back Linking’ strategy, so make sure you place some effort into it to get it as much exposure as possible.

Step #2. Submit your article to Article Directories.

This is the next step and an vital one at that because this is where your article or articles are going to get picked up by website owners and/or ezine publishers who are in constant need of fresh, quality information to feed their audiences hunger for information.

There are literally hundreds of Article Directories out there and thousands of ezine publishers looking for quality content on a daily basis. And if they choose your article for publication, they must include your ‘Resource Box’ with your websites information and URL.

It’s all about the numbers. The more Article Directories and websites you submit your articles to, the more potential Backlinks you’ll get to your website.

And since Article Directories have recently adopted RSS(Real Simple Syndication) technology into the mix your articles will even get More mileage without you lifting a finger, making even more Backlinks to your website.

More on RSS in a minute.

Are you starting to see the Power behind writing your own articles.

I hope so.

Step #3. Make your own RSS Feed for your articles.

This last step is a very Powerful step as well.

What you need to do is set up your own RSS Feed for your articles.

Now, if you don’t know what RSS is here’s the basic definition…

RSS is by definition – an acronym for ‘Real Simple Syndication’ or ‘Rich Site Summary’, and the .XML extension is the format used for distributing your news headlines via the Web, which is known as ‘Syndication.

‘Syndication’ is where the RIGHT power of RSS is unleashed, getting your message or information across the web in an INSTANT to websites, subscribers and/or readers who subscribed to your RSS Feed.

The simplest way for you to do this is to set up your own Blog either through…

Wordpress.org – http://www.wordpress.org

Or through…

Blogger.com – http://www.blogger.com

Wordpress is a small more advanced so I recommend if you don’t have alot of experience with Blogs or installing scripts that you go set up a Blogger blog which will only take you less than 5 minutes to do.

I’m just giving you some options, that’s all.

Once you’ve set up your Blog the only thing left for you to do is add you articles.

TIP: Make sure you hyperlink your URL and use Anchor Text with your most targeted keywords. By doing this the Search Engine spiders will rank your website higher under that keyword term you specify in your Anchor Text.

After you’ve added your articles all you have to do now is submit your new RSS Feed to RSS Directories and RSS Search Engines.

Here’s a few resources for you to get started with.

Ping-O-Matic – http://pingomatic.com

RSS Top 55 – http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

That’s it.

Now I know I dumped alot of information on you within this article so just take it Step-By-Step because once you implement it properly it will benefit you for years to come with Backlinks to your website and FREE targeted traffic via the Search Engines, Website Owners and eZine Publishers.