Submit your site to the many awards sites on the Web. If you win, you get to place that award on the site and the award site usually links to your site from theirs as a bonus.
Go to sites that offer "free" Web space and create a small (3 to 5 page) site on the same subject as your own site. Link it back to your site. Submit the new site to the SE's for indexing. It isn't an obvious self promotion and it should get you some credit for link relevance. Just make sure that the "free" site is one that the SE's will index and make sure that the content on the new, free site is valuable and useful to both the engines and the search engine public.
If you have your own server, or if you can work out a deal with your ISP for extra IP addresses, register URLs and point them to the extra IP addresses and do the same thing described above. URL registration has gotten so inexpensive these days that cost should not even be a consideration.
If you offer a contest or sweepstakes on your site, you can get free links to it from the many contest and sweepstakes directories on the Web.
Offer a small discount to anyone who agrees to post a graphic pointing to your site on theirs. Anyone who goes through that link will get a discount off your goods or services, and you'll get added link popularity.
I have found that it is hard to handle the "mechanics" of building link popularity pages. It is very time consuming to add the links to a client's site and follow up by sending an email to the site that you would like a link back from. So I have developed a dynamic database link system whereby the client can add the link, logo, and description on their own without having to know any code. We also created for them the template email that they can send to the other site's Webmaster. This saves the client money and enables them to take over this function instead of me having to handle this task.
Host a Top Site. Top Sites can work for almost any topic. A Top Site is run by a cgi program. There are several ways to configure the program, but most rank by the amount of incoming traffic a site sends. Here's how it works. A site signs up for a Top Site. They add your link or button with their top site id in the link on their site. The link points to your Top Site via the cgi program. The referring site gets credit for the visitor. The more visitors that site sends, the better it ranks. An added benefit is that all the outgoing links from your Top Site go through your cgi-bin and are redirected to the site. So if you are worried about sharing too much PageRank (which I wouldn't worry about myself), you won't be sharing it by using a Top Site. You can find Top Site programs, some of which may be free at The PHP Resource Index (http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/Website_
Promotion/Top_Sites/) and The CGI Resource Index (http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/
Website_Promotion/Top_Sites
Do you have a members-only Web site? Offer site owners free membership if they link to you.
Host your own Web Ring. All the links on every Web ring banner point to your site and redirect to member sites, your site if you host it. You can find Web Ring programs at The PHP Resource Index (http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/Website
_Promotion/Web_Rings/) and The CGI Resource Index (http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/
Website_Promotion/Web_Rings/). However, don't join a Web ring for link popularity purposes as all the links point to the ring server and redirect to member sites. However, they can be useful for building traffic
Do you have a discussion board? Invite other related sites to link to it.
If you give away something on your site, don't forget to try and get a listing from the sites that list sites that give stuff away, such as The Free Site (http://www.thefreesite.com/). (Bill Gentry with Look Sharp Designs)
Write a review of a Web site, then tell the site owner it's theirs to post in exchange for a link.
If an established and respected writer, like Robin Nobles, asks you for a contribution for an article he or she is writing, always say yes (if you have the knowledge)! Established writers get published in a lot of places that you can't. The writers will always give you credit and may give you a link in the article as well. |
