Getting Hooked On Link Baiting

If you have spent any time at all on the internet, there is a good chance that you have participated in or observed the effects of link baiting. Link baiting is the process where a site does things to garner unsolicited links from other sites and these "hooks" can range from putting up information to using negative reviews of popular products. In terms of internet marketing, link baiting can be a terrific way to make sure that your website achieves good notice from the search engines and from people who are just surfing the web.

Informational link baiting is quite popular and has the added benefit of giving you a reputation as an expert in your field. People will want to link to you because you provide good information, especially if it relates to their own site. Though it will require some effort, you will find that this type of link baiting draws you a healthy degree of traffic that is relevant to your business and services. Some informational hook will show thee browsers how to do something, or explain the history or workings of your type of service. You may also want to provide news hooks in the form of a news feed of some sort.

Entertainment hooks are quite popular as well. The prevalence of online quizzes, especially quizzes that can be posted in places like personal blogs are an excellent form of link bait, though they often prove to be quite ephemeral. A good internet quiz or meme is terrific way to take advantage of the viral nature of the internet. You'll give people a favorable impression of your site and your services in this way. If you make sure that the entertainment is geared towards aiming people at your services, you can make sure that though they might come for the entertainment, they'll stay for your sales pitch!

Depending on your services, you might also want to provide tools for the use of those browsing your site. You'll find that people will happily link to tools that they think their friends will find useful and that this is a great way to get whole networks of people interested in what you have to offer. For instance, a financing firm might offer a mortgage calculator, while a makeover site might have a tool that allows users to "apply" makeup to a picture that they upload.

The one of the most important things to understand about link baiting is that there are both good ways and bad ways to go about it. Often, when you read about link baiting, you will see that people are quite negative about, and there is a reason for this. One popular method when it comes to link baiting is to post something negative about someone or something famous. While this can pull everyone from people who strongly support your point of view, to people who strongly disagree with it to people who are just hoping to see some internet drama to your site, at the end of the day, this is essentially a counterproductive type of link bait. You will achieve a rather nasty reputation as well find that there are plenty of people who might like your services, but despise your attitude. If you decide to make link baiting a part of your website marketing plan, do it responsibly!

Link Building And Places To Submit Your Links

Search engines are a great way to get people to your site. The problem is no matter what you sell, search engine rankings for your keywords are most likely competitive. What makes it worse is, people usually don't bother looking for listings beyond the first few pages of the search results. The good news is, on the Internet a small company can effectively compete with companies that are willing to spend thousands of dollars for search engine optimization.

This is what makes it fun. When it comes to competing for keyword position in the major search engines you can stomp large companies in the ground. You will not be able to do it for all keywords, but you will be able to beat them consistently for many keywords. That is if you have a well thought out, persistent linking campaign.

Used effectively, link building can be one of the single best techniques you can use for getting your web site listed in the first few pages of a keyword search. Link quantity and quality are an important element of every search engine's ranking algorithms. If your site doesn't have links, it will not rank well for competitive keywords.

Places to submit your link.

Link Directories

There are hundreds of free link directories where you can submit your link. Search Google for, "link directory". Submit your site to a few new link directories every day. You will soon get link requests from members of these directories. Be picky, only exchange links with sites that are in some way related to, but do not compete with your site.

Article Directories

Good articles will bring one way, related links to your site. Write articles which are related to the subject of your site and submit them to free article directories. At the bottom of each article you can put a link back to your site. Don't just link to your home page, link to pages deep within your site. If your articles are worth reading, there is a good chance that web masters looking for content will use them on their site. There are no better links than one way links that point to pages deep within your site.

Blogs

Search for sites with blogs that relate to your site. If your site is about gardening search Google for, "blog gardening". This will pull up gardenings sites with blogs where you can leave your comments and a link to your site under your name. It is important that your blog comments are genuine and not spam.

Forums

Search for forums with the same niche as your site. Leave your link in forums signature. Again, it is important that your comments are genuine and not spam.

Web Directories

There are thousands of free web directories where you can submit your link. Always submit your site to the major search engines like Google and Yahoo by hand. This means going to their site and filling out the information they ask of you. Doing this to all the thousands of web directories is not possible. I recommend using an automated submission program like AddWeb.

Press Releases

Write press releases about your site and submit them to press release distribution services. Search Google for, "press release distribution service".

Social Networking

Social network services like MySpace and Facebook provide ways for people with the same interests to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, file sharing and blogging. Search engines and people love social networking sites, participate in them and leave a link to your site under your name.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way for people to remember, organize and share bookmarks of web pages and see what others have bookmarked. As people bookmark sites, sites that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, sites are ranked based on their usefulness.

Links are one of the most important ways for visitors to find your site. It's all about getting people to your web site. With persistent link building the search engines can find your site faster and will rank you higher on their search results.

What is Link Exchange?

Link exchanges have been used by webmasters for years as a means of direct marketing. Recently, this practice has gained more popularity among webmasters due to the fact search engines prefer websites that have many inbound links, thus improving positions in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). To the search engines, this is an accurate means of determining the importance of websites. This practice by the search engines to rank websites has helped lead to the popularity of linked-based search engines, like Google. Thus, link exchange software and services have become popular.

There are various ways to initiate a link exchange with another website. The primary way of beginning a link exchange is to email another webmaster and ask to exchange links. Another way to find websites looking to exchange links is to visit webmaster discussion boards. These websites might have link exchange forums or link exchange directories where webmasters can request link exchanges from a specific category or have open requests to allow any website to exchange a link.

The basics of the link exchange
If this is all a bit foreign to you, let's start with the basics: There are two kinds of links: "outbound" links and "inbound" links. Outbound links are links on your site that point to other websites. Inbound links point from outside sites 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 - yoursite - pointing to our site - othersite - is outbound for you, and inbound for us.

Link Exchange Increases PageRank
Google's PageRank is an important measure of the popularity of each web page. The higher your site's PageRank, the better your site will rank in Google's search results. The more high quality links you have pointing to your site, the higher its PageRank will climb.

Link Exchange Increases Link Popularity
The number and quality of websites that link to your website (link popularity) is one of the most important factors that help all search engines (not only Google) to determine your site's relevance for a search phrase. Exchanging reciprocal links with other websites has proven to be an extremely effective solution for webmasters seeking to improve their search engine rankings.

Benefits
* increases your search engine ranking dramatically.
* helps to get a link to your site on similar sites.
* finds sites that are linking to your competition.
* automates your email contact with other sites.
* generates and maintains your links page.
* automatically checks partner sites to ensure they are maintaining their link to your site.
* imports your current links pages.

One-way Links, Reciprocal Links, Three-way Links: What Works Best?

There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn't link back to your website then it's a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you.

That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don't help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That's why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other.

It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn't matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won't.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that have something to do with your site. Link buildings tools can help you to find these sites.