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Ken Austin http://www.1stdiscountshopping.com http://www.gdrmarketing.com

6) Writing articles and allowing them to be re-published

This is by far one of best ways of improving link popularity of your site, and one of my favorites. Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish it in my newsletter and then I publish article in my site as a separate web page. I also submit it to following article submission sites:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml http://certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm

Many webmasters and ezine publishers frequent these article directories in search of articles. Submitting my articles to these directories gives them opportunity of re-publishing my articles. While I have had some success with each of above directories, by far best among them is ezinearticles.com directory.

Now, at end of each article, I mention that people are free to re-publish article as long as they include my resource box (i.e. my bio) at end of article. I always include URL of my site in resource box. This means that whenever someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I have another site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers archive their ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my article in a particular issue, I again get a link.

Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and ezine publishers publish my articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers will read my article. Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be read by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom will publish it... and so on.

Also, since only web sites related to mine would be interested in publishing my articles, all these links tend to come from related sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more valuable than links from unrelated sites.

Writing articles, of course, has another very important benefit - if you write good articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your products or services.

Some notes about writing articles:

i) I have learnt through experience that some webmasters will publish other people's articles and will display complete resource box but will not link to URL mentioned in resource box. In order to prevent this, you need to explicitly state that article can be published only if URL mentioned in resource box is linked to your site.

ii) Your resource box should not be too long - it should be no more than 6 lines long, formatted at 65 characters per line. Otherwise, other webmasters and ezine publishers will hesitate to publish your article.

7) Submitting to directories

This is by far most important step as far as improving link popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only number of links to your site, but also quality of links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of major directories like Yahoo!, Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo! currently requires a payment of $299 per year in order to list any commercial site. Paying them $299 per year just to improve your link popularity is probably not cost effective. But, Open Directory is free, and you should definitely get your site listed in Open Directory.

Also, you should submit your site to as many of smaller directories as possible. You can get a list of such directories at http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searching_the_Web/Search_Engines_and_Directories/.

8) Exchanging links with other webmasters

The single-most effective way of improving link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not direct competitors. This is called reciprocal linking.

However, problem with this method is sheer amount of time it takes if you were to do it manually.

If you decide to do this manually, you can easily expect to spend hundreds of hours on this activity alone.

Here's what you need to do:

i) You need to use search engines to find sites related to yours that are not direct competitors by typing in some keywords that are related to your site.

ii) You also need to find sites that link to your competitors.

iii) You need to visit these sites and see if they actually exchange links.

iv) If you decide that you want to exchange links with a particular site, you need to find out exactly how it wants you to link to it from your site.

v) You then need to manually add a link to this site in your site.

vi) Then, you need to find out email address of owner of website and send owner a personalized email requesting that he/she adds a link to your site in return.

vii) In many cases, you will not be able to locate email address of owner simply because owner has not published any email address on site. In that case, all effort that you had put into evaluating whether or not site is suitable for exchanging links will have been a waste of time.

viii) If you do manage to locate email address, you need to send a personalized and customized email to website owner.

ix) You then need to wait and see whether this site is willing to exchange links with you.

x) If site is not willing to link to you, you need to remove link to site from your site. Once again, all effort that you had put into evaluating site, linking to it and sending an email to owner will have been a waste of time.

You have to repeat same process all over again for next site that you want to exchange links with.

Obviously, there has to be a better way. And there is!

Luckily for you, I have developed a ground-breaking new software called LinkExplore that completely automates entire process of exchanging links with other website owners, thus saving you hundreds of hours of your time.

I had originally developed software for my own needs but later decided to make it available to other website owners as well.

Go to following URL to learn more about software: http://www.LinkExplore.com/t.php?4901

Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of most respected search engine positioning specialists on Athe Internet. hAVE Sumantra's Company place your site at top of search engines. Visit: http://the-easy-way.com/main.html For more advice on how you can take your web site to top of search engines, subscribe to his FREE NEWSLETTER: http://the-easy-way.com/newsletter.html