1. Link Exchanges & Link Popularity

This is the most important Internet Marketing tip there is. If you don't follow any other method from this training, you better use this one. This one technique alone can make or break your website business. It is also one of the most time consuming, which is why you hear of so many failed web businesses. Invest the time into this one for sure.

What are link exchanges and link popularity?
Google.com thinks incoming links are important. So do we but for different reasons. Google thinks if you have a large number of websites that deal with similar themes linking to your site, it probably means your site is very important to that theme or keyword or keyword phrase. So it makes sense that your site receives higher ranking than sites that don't have as many links to them. The more links from websites that have a similar topic as yours, the higher your site will come in the search results. This, in combination with other techniques described later, will help you get a #1 ranking in search engines.

We also feel you should try to get as many links from related sites as possible, and here is our reasoning. Although the search engine rankings are nice and must be achieved, you also have another huge benefit of getting links. If you have a large number of websites that deal with similar themes linking to your site, it means a large number of targeted visitors could be streaming to your site via these links. The fact that relevant incoming links means a lot to Google is a tremendous bonus, but who's to say they won't change their minds on how they rank sites tomorrow. Quality incoming links will remain a tremendous asset, no matter who acquires whom or how the Search Engines change their algorithms.

So to answer our question, link exchanges are nothing more than trading links with other websites related to your (not direct competition however). That being said, how do you get this link exchange set up? You do this by spending hours searching out sites you think might link to yours, then contacting those sites' webmasters to ask if they will put in a link to your site if you link back to theirs. If they agree, you create a "links page" on your website, add a link to their site onto yours, and they do the same for you. Be careful to ONLY accept link exchanges from related sites. Trading links with just any site could result in search engines thinking you are trying to "beat the system" and they could blacklist your site forever (meaning never let your site on their search engine again). The real key is high quality links from related sites.

The first step is to find out what sites are linking to you now.
To do this go to http://www.google.com and type the following into the search box: link:YourSiteAddress.com. Google will show you a list of sites that are currently linking to you. Next, type in link:YourCompetitionsSiteAddress.com to see who is linking to your competitors.

Sites that link to your competitors will most likely link to you as well. This means, you can automatically get pushed to the equal playing field of your competitors. But, just being equal is not enough, you need to surpass them. Start doing some searches for other keywords related to your business. For example, if you own a dating website, type in "dating" and see what shows up.

Go to the top 10-20 listings and visit each site. They are listed in the top 20 for a reason (Google thinks they are popular and respected sites). Scan the sites and try to find a link that says something like "Trade Links", "Link Partners", "Links", "Directory", "Resources" and so on. Many sites have these sections that let you add your site to theirs in exchange for a link back to them on your site. The more links that point to your site, the more money you make, it's as simple as that.
If there is a site you really want a link from, you may need to pay a small fee to the site owner in exchange for your link of their site. If you pay for a link, do not include a link on your site to them for free.

If the word 'bor-ring' didn't just pop into your mind, it will shortly after you start this process doing this task manually. Yet, it is probably the most important of all the strategies mentioned in this section.

There are two key tools we use when identifying which sites we want to really go after as link partners. One is the Alexa Toolbar. You can get it for free at http://www.alexa.com. Basically what alexa does is this. Every website that is visited by a person who surfs the web with an alexa toolbar gets recorded into their database. Alexa then counts the number of times each site gets visited and assigns a rank to that website. The highest visited site is ranked #1 (which is currently yahoo.com). Sites in the millions are the least visited. Although this is not a flawless system, it does help give you an idea of how much traffic a website gets. Would you rather trade links with a site that is ranked 10,000 or 3,000,000? Obviously the 10,000 site, because there is a more likely chance they will be sending you visitors.

The other tool we always use is the google toolbar. http://toolbar.google.com/ The main reason for this is because it shows you how "important" a website is. Once you install the toolbar, there will be a green bar that looks like this:

When you hover your mouse over this pagerank image, it will tell you what google ranks the page you are on. 0/10 is the worst ranking and 10/10 is the best. The higher the pagerank, the more google likes that page. And, what google likes, I like :)

Using the above two tools, you should be able to find great link partners, which will help increase your website traffic exponentially, not to mention give you a huge increase in your search engine rankings.

While we are on the topic of search engines and link popularity, it is good time to bring in search engine optimization.
Search Engine Optimization can be a touchy topic to try if you are not familiar with how search engines work. Here is a guide to help optimize your website for the search engines. These are some of the tasks we do if you were to hire us to do this for you.

• Your page title should include the keywords & phrases you are optimizing your site for.
• Your meta tags should contain these same keywords.
• You should have your keyword density at 4-9% for each page you are optimizing.
• You should have at least 5 bold keywords phrases on your page.
• You need at least 4 links with your keywords in them per page.
• Try to use an <H1> tag with your keywords if possible.
• Names your pages with keywords built in if possible.
• Always have a sitemap on your site. This helps search engines find all of your pages easily, and also makes your site look larger to the search robots.
• Use the least amount of images as possible. They cannot be indexed by search engines.

If all of this is confusing to you, you should probably hire someone to optimize your site for you. If this is not done properly, your site can be permanently banner from search engines for keyword spamming.

Proceed to Step 2 - Pay Per Click Search Engines

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