A lot of Registrars and Hosting companies spend their budget online looking closely at costs/signup and other hard measures to see if they are getting their money’s worth. They often overlook value and power of “branding” their name and how lasting that form of marketing can be. As most commodity products found out a long time ago, “branding” is key to longevity. As web hosting industry moves to this sort of market it will be interesting to see how well branded companies do against less well known counterparts no matter what their online budget may be.

I think there are lessons in GoDaddy’s Super Bowl marketing that we can all learn from. First, “branding” is a very powerful and last lasting tool. This is evident by their jump to leading Registrar position and maintaining it half a year later. Secondly, instead of just making an advertising campaign, make advertising campaign news on its own. This will deliver a lot of other press and air time to original campaign.

Link exchanges

A common practice to increase PR is to exchange links with other sites, a practice also known as reciprocal linking. You can start by looking in a directory such as About.com or DMOZ for reputable sites with a topic somehow related to yours. If at all possible, your partner's link page must be accessible from their homepage, have a decent PR and not contain too many outbound links. Open each URL to learn a little bit about each site and find a contact email and than send a personalized email asking for a reciprocal link.

In addition you should set up a links page that is easily accessible on your site to offer reciprocal linking opportunity.

You should note however that link exchanges and reciprocal linking are slowly becoming a thing of past as this technique has been abused, and search engines have increased their capabilities to detect it. There is strong evidence that search engines give more weight to one-way links (such as links from directories or from articles).

Writing articles

This is a great way to get links from important pages with high PR and it is successfully used by many top marketers. Basically, you write articles related to your field, and allow others to publish them for free in websites and newsletters. At end of your article, you include a resource box (a small bio) with a link to your website. The link should include full URL spelled out (http:// …) since some sites copy just text and delete links. Now you’ll have to publicize your articles by finding sites that post articles. Type your main keywords + “articles” in Google to find potential sites. Before spending time to send your articles check each site to verify it has a PR of at least 4.

As your articles get published, your links will spread like wildfire and your PR will increase. The bonus is that many of sites that publish articles are respectable portals or news sites and such sites are likely to have a high PR.

Getting Links without Even Asking

My favorite way to get links (but most time-consuming) is to simply have best site on Internet in any specific niche. Even if you think there is nothing unique about your website try to find a small niche where you can specialize. Interestingly enough, if your site is focused around a theme and is well written, providing tons of useful information and is constantly updated, you often won't have to seek out links at all. Other sites will simply link to yours. The better your content, more one-way links and reciprocal link offer you will get over time.

Guest Book Signings

Another linking strategy is guestbook signings, as most community-based sites allow free signature links in forum posts. So participating in popular forums related to your industry is likely to increase your PR. You can search web old fashioned way. Find a guestbook, drop a note with your URL or signature and move on, or you can pay a guestbook signing service a few dollars to auto-sign your name and site URL in several thousand guestbooks.

Keep in mind, that this technique is questionable since there is a dispute among search engine optimization specialists if this technique is effective or not. It is speculated that search engines may apply filters to prevent guestbook links from increasing PR.

Get a Blog

Blogs are newest hot trend on Internet and are also valuable as an online marketing tool. They make it simple for average joe to write online and even add content to their site on a daily basis with just a few clicks of mouse. This dramatically changes way information is shared and distributed. With blogs anyone can easily become a source of valuable information. The search engine companies recognize this and make it a point to spider blog networks on a regular basis.

There are in fact several blog programs available that you can either load into your own domain with ease or that you can use from a third-party, remotely-hosted server. One popular service is Blogger.com by Google. Adding a blog by Blogger to your new website will ensure it gets spidered within days.

There are actually a few ways to get one-way inbound links with blogs. The first way is simply to host a blog on your website and update it frequently. People tend to link to blogs because they provide content that is constantly being updated. The second way is to submit it to blog directories. Just like website directories, there are tons of blog directories you can submit to for free. Just do a search on Google for "blog directory" and you will find them. The third way of getting inbound links with a blog is to host it somewhere other than on your website. Then, provide a link from your blog to your website. After you have done that, you can submit your blog to directories for extra page rank and added exposure.