8 Promote with Links
Anyone who believes “If you build it they will come” is relevant to the Internet is probably living in a Field of Dreams. The reason why this chapter is positioned ahead of monetization is because if you do not get any traffic, there is no need for offering anything to buy. Before you can make money on ads or selling anything else, you need traffic. This chapter will give you a lot of different ways to get people flocking to your website, or at least to get your keyword phrase(s) ranked well in search engines.
Google and other search engines like websites that have backlinks. A backlink is a link on someone else’s site that links to yours. The most effective backlinks are ones that are anchored to good keywords. For example, here is the coding for a good backlink for this website:
<a href=”buildawebsitetutorial.com”>website building tutorial</a>
The anchor text is “website building tutorial.”
But all backlinks are not created equal. Google gives importance to backlinks in proportion to the page rank of the site they are situated on. A backlink on a PR5 page is better than a backlink on a PR1 page. To be able to see the Page Rank of a page you are visiting, you can install a free Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com. There are also some free online pagelink checkers you can visit, but I have found their results do not always match those on my Google toolbar.
One way to get free links is to list your site in a free web directory. Here is one of the best ones I have found, as long as you are located in Canada - CanLinks.net. If you do a search for “free directories” you’ll find a gajillion of them, but most of the free ones have low page ranks, and most of the better ones require a reciprocal link. One of them is mine. It’s at http://www.newagewebdirectory.com and it has a PR4 ranking. You don’t need to provide a reciprocal link, but there is a one-time charge of $5.
An excellent way to get free backlinks is to write articles and submit them to article directories such as http://www.ezinearticles.com and http://www.goarticles.com. The first is a PR6 site and the 2nd a PR3. They both allow you to put backlinks into the resource box area at the end of your articles. This technique of writing original articles and submitting them to directories works so well that some internet marketers do not even build websites. They simply write articles about products for sale and include their affiliate links to the product’s sales page in the resource box. This is known as “bum marketing.”
Here are more way to get backlinks…
Sign up for forums that are pertinent to your topic, and include your backlink in your signature file. Whenever you post a comment, your backlink will be included.
Visit blogs that pertain to your topic and make comments on relevant posts. When you comment, include some keywords as part of your name, for example, I could leave my name as Robert - Website Tutorial. That will be linked to whatever URL I write in.
You can also create videos and post them onto YouTube. Put your keywords in the video title and your URL in the description.
Sign up for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and put links to your site in your profile.
Send out press releases. The better online press release sites (such as PRweb.com) charge a fee, but there are also some free ones. Google “free press release submission” and see what you can find.
Proof this system works
On June 21, 2008 I registered a dotcom domain for $8.41. I posted four original articles on it (3 posts and 1 page) none of which appear anywhere else on the internet. I added links to it from 2 of my other sites that are PR5 and PR4, and also listed it on two free directories rated at PR5 and PR2. I did not submit any articles to any article directories.
Four days later, at noon on June 25, I did a google search for “my primary keyword phrase” and saw to my great surprise and delight that my site was ranked number 8 out of 26,400. Granted, it’s a pretty tiny niche, but nevertheless, I am convinced if I had built a “regular” website instead of using WordPress, I’d never have been indexed so fast and ranked so high in only four days.
9 - How to Make Money with your Site