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I like to stress the importance of link building when trying to increase your website traffic. Search engines are constantly changing the ways that they rank web pages based on on-page factors (coding, navigation, url’s, keywords, etc), but they will always give precedence to websites with good inbound links or off-page factors.

I recently ran across an article called “10 steps to getting links to your site” by Craig Fitield, who happens to be a product manager and search engine marketer at Microsoft.
His advice is valuable to any link building campaign, but the fact that it is coming from a member of the Microsoft team proves that even Microsoft bases their search engine primarily on link popularity.

Most of Craig’s tips are geared towards organizing your efforts (i.e. setting goals and using spreadsheets) and the rest are just good linking habits. While it isn’t new advice, it is good, sound advice worth repeating.

I would, however, like to add a few of my own tips:

When contacting a potential link partner for the first time via email, put extra effort into writing subject lines. Todd has a really good post on this and he also gives some examples of good and bad subjects.

Before getting a link, make sure that your link provider isn’t attaching a no-follow tag to the links on his website. If this is the case, don’t waste your time unless you stand to gain a definite traffic increase from having a link with them. Firefox has a toolbar feature that will highlight the no-follow links on a page.

Remember that when you link to a website, you will automatically be associated with that site by the search engines. So choose your friends wisely because if they are guilty of spamming, you too will be considered guilty by association.

Once you have done enough link building you will see that there is a methodology to it. Experience and creativity will then lead you to develop your own techniques.

Good Luck
iTraffic Control

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Linking, SEO Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.