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Improving Your Inbound Linking Strategy

It is important to be a part of a “community” of affiliated Websites for a couple of reasons. First, you want to target traffic that will potentially purchase your products/services. Secondly, a major criterion of many search engines for top ranking is the number of quality external links that your Web site has (also known as link popularity).

You should be linked to industry associations, organizations, and other key areas that might drive prospects to your site. It is important to set up and maintain your external linking strategy if you are going to bring in business from the Web.

Without an effective external linking strategy the only people that will know about your Web site are the people that you inform it is there.

Some good things to do to improve your Link Popularity are as follows:

First and most importantly, evaluate your competitor’s Internet linking strategy! Get a detailed report of your competitor’s links by going to http://www.linkpopularity.com/. This will give you a good sampling of your competitor’s backward links. Emulate their successful strategies. You can also go to most search engines and type in link: (and type in the company website address, for example link: www.abcCompany.com) and get the backward links for that company on that particular search engine.
Focus on related and important links only. Having a lot of links is not what is important, the links pointing to your site must be relevant to your company. Affiliated associations, organizations, complementary non-core competing businesses, (if you are a manufacturer put your distributors’ links on your site, if you are a distributor then put the manufacturers or suppliers that you represent on your site). Having links from the Thomas Industrial Network’s websites such as http://www.thomasnet.com/ is a terrific way to increase your relevant external inbound links fast and with a fantastic keyword density ratio quality that is tough to match (due to them listing all the companies that would consider you a competitor and their customized descriptive text at each listing from the same page that you will be linked from). In addition, ThomasNet.com has a tremendously high page rank, therefore having links to from their site to yours will significantly help your search engine optimization efforts!
If you contract with www.ThomasNet.com for their links you will also tap into their existing market share of quality prospects searching for your supplying capabilities at the same time! They are the largest industrial Internet directory and they are premised on routing buyers/engineers to suppliers at the exact moment they are making their sourcing decisions. They are dominating the Internet just like they dominated the Print directory business over the last century. Internet Consulting Inc.com will be happy to put you in touch with a quality Thomas representative in your local area.
When you are adding external (or even internal links within your own website) put the keyword/phrase in the hyperlink text.
Create a testimonials page and write a brief testimonial about a website that you would like to get linked to your site.. then contact the site of the testimonial and encourage them to link to your sit
Look to see if related sites offer guestbook’s or forums, if they do post a message and include your URL in your signature.
List your site in one or more of the major directories such as thomasnet.com, Yahoo!, Looksmart, and Open Directory Project. Also see if your site is relevant to a particular About.com area and submit it to the guide.
Become a content provider in your focus area and get your articles posted across the Internet in related areas.
Know that with Google the more outgoing links you have the more your link popularity score may be reduced, therefore links to your site are more influential when you do not have to link back.
There are many more ideas… and I am sure that you can come up with your own. The concept is get as many links pointed to your site as possible!

Something to AVOID in link popularity:

Don’t participate in link exchange programs or link farms! Google and other search engines will ban sites that participate in these types of programs that artificially create link popularity!