Put your business on Main Street
Links Are a Popularity Contest
Learning how to get links is an important lesson to master. Think of links as popularity votes, and doesn’t everyone wants to hang out with the cool kids? The more incoming links you have, the greater your traffic is likely to be.
Imagine your business is in a beautiful building, and you have spent a lot of time decorating your store to make it warm and inviting to customers. Would you rather have it located on a quiet, hard to find street, or on a busy street in a high traffic area? Of course you would rather have it located on a busy street to maximize your chances for customers to see you when driving or walking by.
Links are like Trails of Breadcrumbs
It’s the same with your website. It’s much better to have a site in an area where a lot of people will see it, rather than having only a few visitors a day drop in. Is your website attracting loads of traffic, or is it on the 12th page of search engine results where nobody can find it? You can change all that with a few tried-and-tested traffic generation techniques.
First and foremost, it’s important to know that search engine optimization is not the only way to gain massive amounts of traffic. Search engine result pages are in a sense just web pages – similar to regular websites around the web. It can be lucrative to have your website listed on the top of search engine results. Hence, loads of people see your site’s link and you attract loads of traffic.
However, another way to get website visitors is to have your website mentioned by another website that attracts a high amount of traffic. For example, imagine what would happen if your website was mentioned on the front page of Yahoo’s website. Your website might receive so many visitors your bandwidth might go over the limit.
Be Fun and Interesting
The trick is to get other high-traffic websites in your niche to link to your website. To do this, you must give them very strong reasons to link to you – maybe it’s a very thought-provoking article you’ve posted on your site, maybe it’s the ingenious solution to a lifelong problem. In short, give people amazing reasons or value to earn a link from them.
Alternatively, you may link to a certain high-traffic website that’s related to yours and ask for a link back. This technique is called reciprocal linking and is a very common technique for gaining links. However, before you even ask for the link, check your own website and ask yourself if you would be proud to recommend such a site to your readers, and whether it will provide useful information to your readers.
The easiest way to get incoming links is to make sure your website has its own value so that people will automatically want to bookmark your site, post your URL, and link to your site from their blogs and websites. The best way to do this is to update your website regularly with excellent content, which will encourage visitors to want to come back and recommend your site to friends.