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Once your website is up and raring to go, it is important to start formulating a marketing strategy. The obvious goal is to attract as many visitors as you can. One of the best ways to do this is through a “Linking Campaign”.
In order to begin your campaign, you must first understand the difference between reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. A reciprocal link simply means that two websites are linking to each other. Both sites generate traffic for each other simultaneously. This follows the philosophy of, “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” A non-reciprocal link refers to a website that links one-way. A good linking strategy is to create as many inbound non-reciprocal links as possible, with some strategically chosen reciprocal links as well.
Nowadays, search engines are incredibly smart. The positioning of your site depends a great deal upon how many people link to your site. A lot of non-reciprocal inbound links tells a search engine that your site contains valuable information. After all, who’s going to recommend your site without reciprocation unless they believe it will benefit their readers?
On the other hand, a website with a bunch of reciprocal links could indicate that the webmaster solicits links. This means topics and information may or may not be connected, and the probability that it’s a valuable site diminishes. To determine this, search engines then look for key word connections between reciprocal links to determine if the sites are in fact benefiting each other.
The key is: choose your reciprocal links wisely. Connect only to websites that contain related information that readers will enjoy. Spend your time cultivating valuable information on your site, and then tell everyone you can! If you end up having more non-reciprocal links than reciprocal links, search engines will rate your site much higher than those that don’t.
Then the question becomes, how do you generate non-reciprocal links? The first step is to create a site packed with valuable information. Make your site full of interesting details that similar sites’ readers can’t live without. If webmasters see the benefit to linking to your site, your Marketing Campaign becomes a snap.
When you begin, try emailing other webmasters. Tell them why your site will be important to their readers, and make it easy for them to say yes by including a ready-made link. You’d be surprised at how many people agree to help!
You can also try writing a nice review of a few sites on your webpage. Email the sites’ webmasters and let them know about your testimonials. It’s likely that the sites will want to advertise your nice comments to their readers by posting a link to your review.
Finally, submit your website to as many relevant web directories as you can. This is one of the fastest, most powerful ways to make your website known. If you search for “web directory” on Yahoo!, it returns over 1 million results. You can pick and choose the ones you’d like to submit to. Unfortunately, this can be very time consuming. Plus, with over a million results, how do you know which directories are the best choice?
When I realized how tedious the process can be, I decided to create a product that would make the job easier. Master Programmer Paul Martin and I have compiled 280+ of the best directories on the web.
