Increasing Hits by Improving the Link Popularity of Your Site

4) Starting an Awards Program

A moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to start an awards program. You can have websites that are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites that win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site, preferably to a page that contains more information on the award.

If you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe to your newsletter to see if they win the award.

Make sure that you give awards to only those sites that deserve to win. If you give your award to sites that don't deserve it, your award will have little credibility, which in turn will damage the credibility of your company. Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it on their sites.

5) Giving testimonials

This may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials for products or services that you find useful can be another moderately effective way of improving the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will agree since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility to the testimonial.

Of course, please don't go about giving testimonials to every company you can locate just because it will improve your link popularity :-)

6) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists

Another moderately effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site is to post to online message boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the individual messages that are posted to that message board are archived in static HTML pages (i.e. the URLs for the individual messages should not contain a "?"). Otherwise, the search engines may not spider these pages and hence, will not be able to find your link.

Email based discussion lists that are archived on the web in static HTML pages can also be used to boost the link popularity of your site in a similar manner. In this case, the signature file that you use with your email program should contain the URL of your web site.

7) Setting up new web sites

Yet another moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to set up new web sites and have these new sites link to your main site. If you are Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon), you can afford to purchase new domains and have these new domains link to your main site. If you are not Jeff Bezos, you can simply set up new sites with some of the free web hosts. (Of course, your primary web site should always be hosted in a separate domain of its own). Simply add a few pages of unique content to each of your new sites, and have each of the pages in your new sites link to your main site.

If you use this technique, make sure that you do not duplicate content across multiple sites. If you do, the search engines might penalize your sites for spamming. You need to ensure that all the pages that you create for these new sites contain unique content.

The disadvantage of this method is that some search engines (like AltaVista) refuse to spider sites that are present in the free web hosts. Still, there are many search engines that will spider your site, and hence, the link popularity of your main site will improve in these search engines.

8) Starting a Link Contest

A good method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something that other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners.

Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, the webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their links. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their links to your site.

Also, make sure that you require all participants to have a link to your site either in their home page, or in an internal page of their site that is linked to their home page. Also ensure that the page which contains the link is no more than two levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than two clicks to go from the home page to the page containing the link).
If they don't do this, the search engine spiders may not index the page that contains the link to your site, and hence, may not find your link.