Linking Your Way to Maximum Web Traffic

As an Internet Marketing Consultant, I am often asked the question, "How do I get the maximum number of visitors to my web site." After answering the question time and again, I find myself going over dozens of ways to accomplish this, but there is one way that is underutilized and always works regardless of the type of site you've created.

This article will address this marketing strategy, but before getting into that, you must know that driving traffic to your web site is not enough. You should know ahead of time the outcome or result you wish to get from your visitors?

If you are looking to generate leads for your own use through your web site, your site should be ready to offer something in return for the leads you want to create. If you offer a free report, which can be easily downloaded or e-mailed automatically from your site, you'll have a good reason to ask for the visitor's information and gather that lead.

If you instead want to drive traffic to your web site in order to sell a product, you should offer incentives, free samples, or entering a contest to win your product in order to generate a lead you can follow up on at a later time.

Some business owners simply want to drive traffic to their web site in order to let visitors know that their company exists. An on-line brochure is basically what they have and is a great way for business owners to save on printing, postage, time, and distribution costs. However, unless the web site has a professional look and "feel" to it, the visitor will dismiss the information as a waste of web space.

Non-profit organizations, school districts and other organizations utilize their web site to keep members and community informed of their events, proposals, updates, community information and other worthy information important to their visitors. Some organizations also make it possible for the visitor to interact with the organization by use of special on-line forms such as that they get immediate feed back from specific issues. This gives them a chance to interact with their memberships and attract new members in the process.
There are various reasons organizations create a web presence, and they should increase the chances of having a successful web site by having as many qualified individuals visit their web site.

Since driving qualified traffic to your site is the key, I've found that Link Popularity is perhaps one of the best-kept secrets to driving traffic to your web site.

What is Link popularity? There are several search engines which position web sites depending on how many other web sites link to your domain name. The more links to your web site, the higher the positioning. Although more and more search engines are starting to utilize this method of positioning web sites, there are four of the top ten search engines which use this method of positioning. These search engines are, MSN.com, AltaVista.com, Google.com, and AllTheWeb.com. Although there are other factors to consider for top positioning, increasing the number of links to your site will increase the chances of people finding your site easier.

How do you get other web sites to link to yours? Simple, but time consuming. Your first step is to locate as many web sites that target your specific market and can use your web site as a resource or link exchange. If, for instance you're in the rubber industry and are looking to drive traffic from other web sites, you can first approach the various rubber manufacturing associations. Some of these associations will allow you to place a link to your web site from theirs at no cost to you if you are a member. Other web sites to consider may be Industry specific resource web sites. You can find these very easily by searching on your favorite search engine.

Here's a little known trick I use for finding the best web sites for linking. I look for a web site, which I know has been around awhile, or is prominent in my industry. Once I have this information, I check to see how many web sites they are linked to, and then ask those sites to exchange links with me.

In order to find which sites link to them, you should visit one, or all of the search engines that utilize this search technique. For instance, if you wanted to know which web sites are linked to my web site, aeadvertising.com, you can visit the search engine altavista.com. Place this command on the search field, "link:www.aeadvertising.com" (without the quote marks). As of this writing, 523 listings will show as a result of the search. Each listing has a link to each site. You can then visit each site and if they target your specific market, you can try to get your site listed.

You can do the same for MSN.com and AllTheWeb.com. Each search engine picks up a few different sites than others. If you do the same search in MSN.com, you'll find 548 listings, whereas searching in AllTheWeb.com you'll get 528 matches. Finding the links to your site on MSN.com is the same command as in AltaVista.com, however, AllTheWeb.com uses a different command. When searching in AllTheWeb.com, the command is http://www.aeadvertising.com and click on the drop down which indicates "links to this URL." A less-known search engine, www.fast.no will produce 661 links to my site, which is more than any other search engine, but repeats the URLs more often.

Regardless of the search engine you use, you can do this for as many domain names as you wish. You should start off with industry leaders and work your way down to your competitors. You'll be amazed at the number of other web sites you can use to drive traffic to your site.

Once you're done with specifically targeted web sites, which will increase the chances of attracting those visitors to your site, you should try linking to more generic web sites as well. Although the sites may not be as targeted as you'd like them, they will increase the number of links to your site and thereby the popularity to the appropriate search engines. Web sites, like hvmarketplace.com lists businesses in the Hudson Valley, New York area. If you are a consultant, you can try and get listed with www.consultantsgroup.com and target business owners who visit the web site for its business articles.

You can link yourself automatically to thousands of web sites by certain companies like linkstoyou.com, but be cautious, because the links don't last long on the "Free For All" pages they submit to. If you do utilize these services, create a "throw away" e-mail address and don't use your own because you will receive hundreds, if not thousands of e-mail ads (or junk e-mail) as a result.

Link popularity is definitely a way to get visitors to your web site. It has worked for thousands of companies and many of my clients.

Written by Edison R. Guzman