Getting Links to Your Business Web Site

One of the best ways to optimize your business’s Web site is to earn a higher search engine placement. One way to do this is to increase the amount of other sites that link to you. Most search engines use the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site to determine how to rank your site. The

Here are a few ways to convince other sites to link back to you.

Link exchange
Link exchanges are probably the easiest way to get other people to link back to you. You post a link to another company on your site in exchange for a link to your site on theirs. Find merchants that sell complementary products, and offer to trade text links or ads with them.

If you're just starting out and your site doesn't get a lot of traffic, you may not get a one-to-one trade; be prepared to make concessions, at least until you have a track record — and traffic — to point to. That said, most companies won't turn down an opportunity for exposure, so you'll probably find a few willing to exchange links with you.

Offer free content
Publishing content on other Web sites is another way to get them to link back to you. Maybe there is an established site you'd like to appear on, and they rebuffed your link-exchange offer. Offer them a short, informative article for their site, and request that it include a link back to your site. They get free content; you get the link you wanted. Everybody wins.

RSS
If you update your site regularly, you can take advantage of RSS. RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it allows users to take content from your site and easily publish it on their own sites. Each time someone adds an RSS feed to their site, your links will be included.

Users can also "subscribe" to your site and receive updates through their RSS reader program. It's a lot like having an instant email newsletter, without as much of the hassle and expense associated with newsletter campaigns.

Publishing an RSS news feed is very simple. All you need is a software package that allows you to send the feeds from your site and the content to include in the feed.

This can be a drain on your bandwidth, since the articles will be served from your site, but this is usually well worth the extra expense. If you are not familiar with RSS feeds, you can find them on several popular news websites. Take a look at what kind of content is being RSS-syndicated, and see if it's a good fit for your site.

In addition to receiving links on other sites, an RSS feed will increase your site’s exposure, which is always welcome.

These are just a handful of examples of ways to get inbound links and improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Be creative, and experiment with different options. Pay attention to whether your ranking improves each month. Chances are you'll notice a difference.