Getting Traffic to Your Website 

One component of building the page rank of in the search engines is that of link popularity. Link popularity simply means that other websites are linking to you and thereby making your look more popular or valuable or relevant to the subject you are about. The links pointing to our website are often referred to as backlinks. Backlinks come in two basic varieties traded links and one way incoming links.

One component of building the page rank of in the search engines is that of link popularity. Link popularity simply means that other websites are linking to you and thereby making your look more popular or valuable or relevant to the subject you are about. The links pointing to our website are often referred to as backlinks. Backlinks come in two basic varieties traded links and one way incoming links.

Link Trading

The links pointing to your website are the important links. In the process of building our page rank we may contact businesses and establish a partnership with them and ask them to link to our website. Most of the time this will require that we link back to their website as well. We call the process link trading or reciprocal linking.

Link trading has been an important strategy in the past in establishing our link popularity, especially in what we would call web 1.0. Now we are moving in to what we might call web 2.0 a different kind of web environment that is more user driven with my space websites, blogs, social bookmarking etc. This user driven process is causing search engines to look differently at link trading. While it is still an important and valuable strategy, search engines are becoming smarter and the value of a traded or reciprocal link is much less than that of a one way link pointing to our website. This actually makes sense as we think about it though if we have a good website and it contains valuable information and other websites recognize that, as they link to us on their own without us having to link back that demonstrates a stronger link popularity to the search engines.

One way to find complementary sites that you might contact is to do a Goggle search to find out who your direct competition is. Once you have the domainname of your competition you can feed that to the major search engines using a special syntax in the search engine that will tell the search engine to return all the sites it has indexed that point to a particular website. The syntax varies with the search engine but is as follows.

Google use "link:domainname.com" and then click search. I have also found that I can get more information by using "links:domainname.com" and "links: domainname.com"

Yahoo use "linkdomain:www.domainname.com" and then click search
   To eliminate onsite links from that particular domain use the following search string:
   "linkdomain:www.domainname.com -site:www.domainname.com"
   "To limit your search to results from sources like blogs and forums use a search string like
   "linkdomain:domainname.com thread reply forum blog"

MSN use "link: domainname.com" and then click search. This not necessarily a reliable search on MSN.

Now that you have a list of websites, you can check to see if you want to approach them to trade links with you. Some criteria to implement is as you look at them check the Google toolbar page rank info to see what their rank is. If they are a page rank of 0/10 then they probably aren't worth your time to contact them. If you also have the Alexia toolbar loaded and they are a page ran 0/10 but indicate that they are getting a lot of traffic then there may be an exception to that rule and even though they probably won't help your page rank they may drive some traffic to your site.

Typically you want to contact websites that have a page rank of at least 1/10 and are at least equal or greater than your websites page rank.

You can load the Google Toolbar by going to toolbar.google.com be sure during the install to check the box to enable page rank or it won't be displayed on your google toolbar. If you have already downloaded the Google Toolbar and page rank is not being displayed, on the right of the toolbar is a "Settings" option you can click on. It will drop down a box and then click on "Options". In the window that opens up click on the tab marked "More" then in the section below titled "Even More" you will se "Page rank and Page info". Put a check in the box just in front of that option and then click okay at the bottom of the window and that should then cause the Page Rank option to be displayed in the Google Toolbar.

The Alexa Toolbar can be down loaded at www.alexa.com. Once installed it will display a number for the top 8 million websites. The number if displayed indicates the number of websites that have more traffic than that site being display at the time. If the website is not in the top 8 million it will display "No data"

One way Incoming Links

So how can we focus on and getting one way incoming links to our website? The first way is to focus on getting live directories to list us in their directory. These directories could be horizontal live directories where the directory has a broad variety of subjects that it maintains. A second type of live directory is called a vertical portal or a directory that list websites that are about a given subject area i.e. Real Estate, or Dog Care... etc. Some of these directories will list your site for free, some free if you link back to them and some for a charge. Naturally we are looking for one way links so linking back to them would be a part of link trading rather than one way links. The longer your site is out there on the internet and after it start getting ranked by the search engines the some site may automatically pick you up and create a link to your.

Writing articles and submitting them to article sites with unique content that is not on your site is a good way to get one way links as well. An authority site like ezine articles will quickly stimulate getting your site listed in the search engines. These articles of course can have a byline linking to your website. The more sites you submit articles to the more one way links you will have. A site like isnare.com will give you the opportunity to submit your article to a wide range of article websites for a minimal feel

Social bookmarking is another way of getting one way links to your website as well; and the social bookmark sites may eventually replace search engines as user communities continue to use them. Search engines will probably always be around but as you bookmark your favorite websites in the Internet space using the major social bookmark sites, people are likely to start searching for websites that people have bookmarked since the user community is now ranking them somewhat by showing them as their favorite sites.

So how do you bookmark a website in the social bookmark websites? The most popular and probably the first website to provide this service is del.icio.us it was born out of the idea that it would be nice to have your books/favorites available where ever you are on any computer so del.icio.us was born. you can go to the delicious website and create and account and add icons to your browser to tag sites to your social bookmark site then later click on the icon to access them. Now there are probably thirty or more social bookmark sites to choose from and you can bookmark your site on all of them if you want. Each time a social bookmark is created it is a one way link to your site.

To make it easy for people to bookmark your website to their social book marks you can add a "bookmark widget" to your page that will allow them to easily pick for the websites that are out there and bookmark it to their favorite site. At the website http://www.addthis.com/ you can get the code to add bookmark widget that you place on your site. The widget looks like this.

There are several variations to choose some say bookmark, some say share some have the symbols for the top social bookmarking sites and other don't. You will create an account out there then be able to get the html code to put the widget on your site.

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