ptg16476052Promoting Your Web Pages 63923
Getting Links from Other Sites
It doesn’t take much surfing to figure out that the Web is huge. It seems like there’s a site
on every topic, and when it comes to popular topics, there may be hundreds or thousands
of sites. After you’ve done the hard work of creating an interesting site, the next step is to
get other people to link to it.
The direct approach is popular but often yields the wrong results. It can be tempting to
simply find other sites like your own and send a personal email to the people who run
them, introducing yourself and telling them that you have a site similar to theirs that they
may be interested in. If they are interested, it’s possible that they’ll provide a link to your
site. More often than not, though, they won’t see your email, or if they do see it, they will
think you’re a spammer and go out of their way to avoid your website.
It’s much better to get links from sites that you’ve already shown your value to. In other
words, you have already visited their site numerous times and participated, giving back to
their community. Once the website owner recognizes you, she will be much more ame-
nable to linking to your site. And the way you get her to know you is by participating on
her site. You can participate by answering or asking questions in comments, providing
feedback (when requested), joining forums, and making yourself known. Most website
comment forms have a field for URL, which you can use to put your URL on their pages.
It won’t get you search engine results, but it still will be seen by the site owner and might
be clicked on by other participants on the site.
When you’re sure that the site owner will recognize you, then sending a direct email mes-
sage asking for a link is a good idea. But remember that the biggest sites often get hun-
dreds or thousands of link requests a day. So even if they know you, don’t be surprised if
they ignore your request.
Content Marketing Through Guest Posting
The thing about asking for links is you are asking the website owner to give you some-
thing while he gains little or nothing. In fact, if search engines decide that your site is a
spam site or link farm, they could ultimately hurt their own authority by linking to you. A
better way to get links to your site on other sites is to start doing guest posting.
Guest posting occurs when you write an article on your topic of interest, but instead of
posting it on your own website, you post it on another website—for free. You see guest
posts on sites all over the Internet on topics ranging from auto repair to zoology. If there
is a topic, there is probably a website related to it, and most sites are willing to post guest
posts if you ask them to.