Text Links
Text Advertising
Text Ads
Linking
Resources
Related Sources

Internet Books

Link Exchange, Link Trading, Linking, Link Strategies, Link Directories

Link Popularity - Linkpopularity durch professionellen Linkaufbau - text links to get traffic and build your search engine ranking.

For advertising information see Linknet Promotions. Get your text ad on hundreds of pages, including blogs and articles distributed on many websites.

Why Getting Inbound Links is guaranteed to get traffic

Exchanging links with other websites is one of the more tedious aspects of website promotion. That's because you cannot effectively automate the process. Any website promotion expert will tell you the same thing. You simply have to bear down and do it, one link at a time.

What makes it even more unexciting is that you cannot just do your link exchange chores for a couple of intensive weeks, and then put it behind you. Doing it right requires an on-going effort that takes months. To get its full benefit you must be constantly on the lookout for useful links. And you must be constantly going out there and creating links.

Let me tell you why it works that way. In the second part of this article I will give you some suggestions on how to go about exchanging links so you end up with some productive ones.

What is a link?

First, let's be clear what we are talking about. There are two kinds of links: "outbound" (or out-pointing) links and "inbound" (or in-pointing) links. Outbound links are links on your site that point to other websites (or other pages within your own site). Inbound links point from outside sites (or other pages within your site) to specific pages within your site.

Therefore, as you can see, any specific link is both outbound and inbound, depending on your point of view. A link on your site — www.yoursite.com — pointing to my site — www.small-busines-online.com — is outbound for you, and inbound for me.

What you want, right from the outset, are inbound links — ones that point from outside sites to yours — because these bring traffic from the other site to yours. You must not lose site of this. The point of exchanging links is to get inbound links./

But often you cannot get inbound links, without giving the other guy a link in return. In other words getting links often involves a trade. This is normally called a "Link Exchange". In the first few lessons of this course I will describe how to do productive link exchanges. In the second half we will talk about what I call Power Linking. That's when it really starts to get interesting.

Why do you need links?

Getting inbound links pointing in to your site from outside sites serves a number of important purposes. First, links from sites that share your same target audience create an important source of direct traffic to your site. A visitor to a linked site sees the link to yours, clicks on it, and becomes your visitor. Some estimates put the percentage of internet traffic resulting from this kind of link as high as 21% of total traffic.

Why do people click on these links? Because they often view a link to an outside source as an endorsement. They assume the webmaster is saying "Here is a source you will find interesting or helpful".

This makes most webmasters hesitant to give outbound links unless they are likely to get something in return. No webmaster — at least no webmaster who knows what he or she is doing — willingly redirects traffic away from her own site unless she thinks her visitor will benefit. The trade off is that she gets something in return. Sometimes the linked-to site is a helpful source for her website visitors. Sometimes she gets a valuable link in return. Sometimes other webmasters are even prepared to pay for links. In fact this is becoming more common as the importance of linking becomes better and better understood.

In Lesson 2 we will look at the special importance of inbound links to Google.

-------------------------------

Rick Hendershot is a marketing consultant, writer, and internet publisher who lives in Conestogo, Ontario, Canada. He publishes several websites and blogs, including Trade Show Tips, Web Traffic Resources, Marketing Bites, SuperCharge Your Website with Power Linking, and many more.