by Linda Barnett

The very best way to raise your search engine rankings and bring more visitors to your website is to get other websites to link to yours. Engaging in a linking campaign is without cost, and it is not a complicated undertaking, but it does require some time, some energy, and the willingness to persevere. There are two ways to get started. One process begins with an online search to identify websites with information about the same subject as yours.

If your website is about about athletics, you could use search terms like "physical conditioning", "athletic gear", "endurance training", "running shoes", and "tennis tips" to find sites which may be interested in adding a link to yours. Or, you can accomplish the same thing by identifying a site like yours which is highly popular, and find the websites which link to it. Just conduct a search in Google or alltheweb.com for "link:" (without the quotation marks) and the complete URL of the popular website. For example, link:http://www.college-scholarships.com (and don't forget the colon after the word "link"). There are also software programs which can automate this process for you, while giving you valuable information about websites which compete with yours. After you have located the websites most likely to link to yours, visit them, obtain the email addresses of their owners, and request a link. You are likely to get the best results if your email is brief, polite, and well written.The description of your site must be interesting and explain why the webmaster's visitors will find it helpful or enjoyable. Be persuasive but avoid hyperbole.You can also offer the webmaster something in return.

For example:

a. offer a link on your site.

b. information of value to website owners. For instance, you might offer to let them know where to find information on great no-cost website promotion tools.

Contact a minimum of twenty-five (25) webmasters a day. If just 10% link to you, you will net 75 links a month. You should begin seeing a marginal increase in visits to your website very soon after you start link building. But, your big benefit will kick in weeks later, as the links to your site are discovered by the search engines and your search engine rankings begin to climb on Google and Yahoo.

Remember, organic search engine traffic is the best converting, most valuable traffic you can have.If you persist in your link building efforts and have a good product or service to sell, you can realize the kind of search engine rankings necessary to bring you more income than you ever imagined possible. It happened to me and it can happen to you too.