If you’ve been sitting and wondering why traffic to your website is trickling in to your website ever so slowly then this article is intended to help you add some much needed oomph to your marketing campaign by using a linking strategy.

You may have heard that linking to other websites can benefit your website. Here are three main reasons:

Traffic . By linking to sites with similar themes to your own you can develop a hub of traffic that will always remain constant. There’s an old saying that “a link lasts for all time” and it’s essentially true. There are short termers, shysters and hucksters that try to tilt playing field but ultimately they are biggest losers in link strategy game.

Once links have been placed they generally remain for years to come, feeding your site with a steady stream of reliable traffic. In fact it often happens that some domains which have been given up by their previous owners have thousands of links still pointing to them after many, many years. It may be a slog in beginning to set up a linking exchange program but you will be rewarded with quality traffic which lasts well into future.

Popularity. When search engines look at how highly to rank a site on their search engine results pages (serps) they follow an in house algorithm which determines where your site gets placed in results page. On page factors such as page titles, headings, Meta tags etc all have a bearing on how your page gets ranked but also important is “popularity” of your website.

The popularity of your site is determined by links that point to your site. Not just any old links either. The type and quality of link is also under scrutiny here and so there is no point rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible, you need to track down quality links to your site to gain best benefit from a linking campaign.

This is third in a series of three articles showing you how to find a suitable linking strategy for your website and put it to work for you.

Link strategy number four. The Reciprocal Link

The classic reciprocal link should be staple diet of your linking campaign. By linking to other sites of similar interest to your visitor you provide a service and in return you get a link back to your site for your trouble. It’s a win/win situation.

There are several good software packages that can help you manage your linking campaign and I’ve listed several in resource box at end of this article.

Link strategy number five. The Paid Link. 

For larger corporate companies and for people who simply don’t want to get involved with exchanging loads of links then it’s possible to purchase links.

Why purchase links?

There are several reasons. Firstly if you are putting a lot of time and money into a new site development then you really need good linking power out of gate. Otherwise you are going to have an expensive site with no traffic.

Purchasing links can give you that jump start required to quickly build a successful site. Try and purchase links from sites related to your site subject. There are several link brokers who can help you find this type of link.

Of course companies who have already built successful internet sites can use their existing real estate to give a leg up to any new start up.

And that’s an added benefit of building a successful internet business; similar to high street chain stores you can pass a proportion of your existing power to help a new business development. This is one major reason why some search engine optimisation companies can really work wonders for your site and others struggle to make any impact.

One useful way of using paid links is to temporarily improve your linking power so that you can garner links from other sites of a similar stature. Many sites that have a high page rank will refuse to swap links with a site of a much lower page rank. Artificially enhancing your page rank will allow you to swap links until your site is big enough to stand on its own two feet and compete. Then paid links can be dispensed with.

The big drawback with paid text link approach is that they are expensive. A single front page text link from a high page rank site can cost $2,000 per link. So you better have deep pockets if you want to do it this way.