If you don’t know already, one of the key success factors to getting loads of free Google traffic to your website is increasing page rank. So just how do you increase your page rank? Well, it’s all in the linking.

To be honest I never could quite figure this Google thing out, how it ranks good sites from bad sites. One day it all clicked for me and its so simple when you look at it from Google’s point of view. Google keeps its customers by providing relevant sites to your search queries. How does it choose the best sites for what you are looking for? Well, first of all it needs to be relevant (key words) and secondly it needs to be useful and of high quality. One way Google knows to measure quality is by the amount of links referring to your site. It stands to reason a site referred to by 100 websites may be more useful than a site referred by just a few right?

So how can we increase our sites chances of shooting up the search engine rankings with incoming links?

The quality of the links you receive is very important. Choose websites that firstly are related and preferably with a higher page rank than your site. The higher the quality link the higher page rank you will receive. In other words getting a link from Amazon.com is going to be worth more than a link on your daughters home page.

Basically there are 3 types of links, Outbound links which are easily added to your site, Reciprocal links where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A, and finally inbound links. These inbound links are the most important of all.

Let me describe how to get links in order of their importance.

How to get incoming links

1. Write articles like this one. Choose a topic you know and write up a short 500 word articles with a link back to your website and post it to article directories. Not only are these one-way links but other websites will pick it up and post one way links on their websites. Google gives you a big tick for each one way link! 2. Viral marketing. Ask other website owners directly if they would like to post your article either on their website or include it as part of their newsletter. If it’s a good article chances are readers will in turn pass this on to other readers providing advertising for both you and the other Webmaster. Like a virus, it spreads to more and more readers who may post the article, providing more one-way links. 3. Post to forums related to your area and include a link in your signature file. It is critical to join in the discussion and not blatantly advertise, as this can look unprofessional and self-gratifying. Add value to the discussion and simply provide a link in your signature. Visit some forums and see who you would link to in the discussion and try and copy what they did right.

How to get reciprocal links

Ask Webmasters directly. These are a little easier to ask for as its clear you are providing them also with a link. Best to first link to their website, then personalize the contact commenting about something on their website specifically. I have found personally calling them if you have the contact phone number the best method. My friend David Newton at www.simplysolo.com has found this an invaluable way to gain in excess of 1,000 inbound links for his site. Simplified it should go like this:

a. Find a relevant site as a potential link partner. Tip – Try entering this into google “your keyword or phrase” + “add url”. This will then list the most popular sites that will allow you to link back to them. b. Firstly create a link to their website c. Contact them directly showing them your link to them with url of their site and something you liked about their site, something unique. Compliments can only help here. d. Schedule to follow them up in one months time and try again if necessary. Best to keep a spreadsheet

Of course not all will link to you and it’s a bit of a numbers game but you can get results. Its better to personalize your contact than mass e-mailing a general group of websites.

Don’t forget to always be polite and keep up a schedule where you will aim to get say ten or twenty links out there per week. You will then have quite a collection after a few months and traffic should start flowing to your site.