My Site is Up, Now What?

Get links, get links, get links. The more links to your site the better! Just make sure you only have quality sites linking to you. You don't want to get involved in any FFA pages or link farms. The search engines may penalize you for this. You also don't want the same keywords in every link. You want to spread your top 5 or 6 key phrases over several sites.

First you want to start with listing your site as many directories as possible. The most popular is The Open Directory Project. This is where Google seeds its spider. The reason this directory is of such high quality is because it is edited by tens of thousands of volunteer editors. It can actually take months for your site to appear here because of the amount of sites being submitted to the directory everyday. This directory not only adds importance to your site, it adds traffic, and lets all the Webmasters know you are there. This brings me to my next point. You want to contact Webmasters with similar sites to yours and ask if they would be interested in a reciprocal link exchange. When doing this, make sure the link directly points to your site and doesn’t redirect. It also helps to have your link text read your targeted keywords. In other words if your site is about “cheap web hosting”, have your reciprocal link read “cheap web hosting”. Search engines actually read the text in the link and relate it to your site. Just be careful not to over do it! Exchanging links with too many sites can actually hurt you. So it is best to keep it to a dozen sites or so. The fact of the matter is that it is better to have sites link to you without you linking back. This makes your site “more important” to search engines. So it helps to list your site with niche sites that are targeted towards similar audiences. These sites tend to send quality traffic and typically charge less for advertising.

We are just scratching the surface on what can be done to get traffic to a Website, but with a little imagination, you could be the next big thing.

Happy Linking!