How to get links to your site

Your business may have the most finely crafted, informative, and useful Web site ever, but it won’t do you much good if no one can find it.

That’s why you need to know about links. They’re what guide users from one Web site to another. And just as important, links are what search engines such as MSN Search/Windows Live Search, Google, and Yahoo use to determine how popular your Web site is, and where to place it in their page rankings.

It may go without saying that the higher your Web site’s page ranking appears on a search engine, the more prospective customers are going to see it.

It gets a bit more complicated because there are different kinds of links, different ways to obtain them, and some rules to follow if you want the search engines to select your Web site.

A couple of things are critical:

• Quality content on your Web site will help generate quality links.
• Follow the rules, because search engines can ban your Web site if they don’t like what they see.

Miki Dzugan, owner of Rapport Online, Inc., has been working with business owners large and small on ways to get their Web sites selected since 1995.

Free links, paid links, or trading links?

"There are three basic ways that you can get links to your site: You can pay somebody to link to your site—for example, banner advertising, paid directory listings, and "sponsored" search results. You can find sites that will link to your site for free or trade links to your site, or you can send e-mails to your list of e-mail contacts with a link to your site," Dzugan said.

Because small businesses typically have small budgets, she recommends going for the free links first—with an eye to establishing links to Web sites that focus on the same topic or topics yours does (also referred to as "community").

Reciprocal linking, or trading links with another Web site, is controversial because it can be both good and bad. "Maybe your site sells pet food and you decide to link with someone who sells beds for pets. That makes sense and it's a very positive link," Dzugan said. If your content meshes well with that of another Web site, that’s a good thing: a quality link. The search engines will approve.

On the other hand, soliciting reciprocal links just for the sake of having a lot of links is probably going to backfire. "Link farming" is a strategy to solicit links for the sake of getting lots of links, Dzugan said. The practice can result in your Web site being banished from the search engines.

Why? Because the search engines consider the merits of the content of your Web site in large part by the links associated with it, by how popular your content is. If you link to Web sites that have no relationship to your community, you probably will suffer the consequences.

Ditto for subscribing to automated linking services that advertise submitting your site to "millions of search engines" every month. Dzugan cautioned that leading search engines don’t accept automated submissions—and that monthly submissions probably will do nothing more than aggravate editors. She said standard practice is to submit to a search engine once, and resubmit only if the original submission hasn’t been accepted within the time promised. She noted that it can take months to be accepted into human-edited directories.

How to tell if search engines are linking to you

Perhaps you've followed the guidelines provided by search engines as best you can and still don't know if they're actually linking to your site. Understanding how the search engines actually operate might be useful.

MSN Search/Live Search, for example, utilizes MSNBot, a Web crawler that combs billions of Web pages looking for links within Web sites to add information to their search index.

Yet not every page that MSNBot crawls ends up being indexed. There are technical, design, and content standards that have to be met—primary among them is placing important content in searchable areas of your pages.

So how do you know if your pages qualify? The easiest way is to actually run a search by typing the URLs for the pages of your site into the search box of the search engine you want to check. If you have followed the guidelines the best you can and your page URLs don't turn up in the search results, you may want to submit your site directly—although that isn't a guarantee your site will be indexed either.

There are other options to draw traffic to your Web site. PRWeb posts press releases for a fee. Fees range from roughly $30 to $300, depending on the number of links you want.

Dzugan also recommends e-mail as a way to get your link to valuable contacts. For example, a company collects e-mail addresses from customers who visit its physical store. When the company goes online, customers are sent e-mail messages containing the link to their Web site. Assuming the Web site content is useful and informative, it’s a relatively simple way to drive traffic to your site.

It’s a simple matter of visibility: your Web site needs to be seen to be effective.