Obtaining Links For Your Website
Author: David Andrew Smith

One of the most difficult tasks, having developed your website
is to promote it on the search engines and achieve first page
rankings. This is after all where we, as web site owners want
to be, especially if you are selling products or promoting your
services. Anything after the third page is generally useless for
attracting visitors and potential customers. So how can you
achieve this first page ranking on the major search engines?

I will assume that you have good content and update this at
least on a weekly basis as this attracts the search engine
spiders to regularly visit your site. However content alone
will not see you leap through the rankings. What will encourage
this movement on all the search engines are backward links.

You will have undoubtedly read of the many ways of getting
links to your website, from reciprocal links to one way links,
and that the latest information out of Google suggests that
buying links may result in a penalty and in being demoted in
the rankings. So how do you, as a busy person running your own
business and attempting to promote your own website do it? You
could as people suggest e-mail a variety of webmasters whose
sites are related to yours asking them to link to you. This is
very time consuming and yields little result. Reciprocal
linking is easier but still time consuming and the links seem
to be of little value now so again the time spent on this may
not be a useful and productive way of using your time.
Directories are again relatively easy if time consuming and
many of them now require a payment for a link in their
directory. If you are planning on registering with as many
directories as possible then this can ultimately turn out to be
an expensive enterprise. This is OK if you have a big budget but
most of us work on very tight budgets. It is also being
suggested that the value of directory links is being downgraded
so again it may not be the most valuable use of your time.

That leaves one avenue, that of writing and publishing
articles. You are presumably an expert in your field so writing
about different aspects related to your website should not be
difficult. The very first article is difficult and takes up a
lot of time but subsequent ones become easier and easier to
write. You will surprise yourself as to what you can actually
write about. How valuable these articles are I can only relate
from my own experience. Three months ago I started writing
articles and have averaged ten per month ever since. When I
first started my web site had 12 links registered on Google, 36
on MSN, 8 on Yahoo and none on Teoma and was languishing on
pages seven and eight. Three months down the line and 30
articles later the site is on the first page of these three
search engines for at least six of my keywords and the links
have increased as follows; Google 54, Yahoo 616, MSN 2056, and
Teoma 606. When these links are investigated over 90% of them
are from these articles which have been picked up by ezines,
weblogs and used as content on other people's sites. It is a
constant source of surprise and enjoyment looking to see where
they end up! Getting excellent link backs to your website is
not the only benefit you get from the articles because they
also encourage visitors to your site, and every visitor is a
potential customer.


About The Author: David Andrew Smith operates a cleaning
services company, http://www.wesparkle.co.uk, which operates
throughout the UK.