How to get more web sites to link to yours

Many Webmasters (and Webmistresses) have found that many more visitors can be attracted to their sites by getting other sites to put a link to their site. This is usually by a mutual agreement to 'cross-link' - reciprocal linking. It's a good way to build web site traffic.

No doubt you've already used this method yourself. But it's often a haphazard process; you stumble across an interesting site, contact the Webmaster and exchange links. Now here's a way to greatly increase the number of sites who will carry a link to your site. It will take a little time on-line, but it will be worth it in terms of the increased traffic to your site.

Step One
First, find out how many sites have a link to your site. How? Easy - just follow these steps:

1. Go to the Google search engine (no, not right now! read on a bit first!)
   
2. In the search box, type the following (where "www.yoursite.com" is the URL of your site):
   link:www.yoursite.com
   
3. Google will then produce all the sites it has found which have a link to your site (which will include links from within your own site).
   

Please note there is no space between "link:" and your URL

The results are not necessarily comprehensive, but Google has one of the largest number of pages indexed.

Step two
So, how do you find other suitable sites who might cross-link with you? Again, you use the above method in Google. This time think of some sites which have similar content to yours. It might be a competitor, or a site with whom you have exchanged links.

Now enter their URL instead of your own in the same format as shown above.For example, if you want to find which sites have links to the UK Government's Department of Trade & Industry (http://www.dti.gov.uk), you would type in the search box: link:http://www.dti.gov.uk

You can, if you wish, leave out the 'http://' - this will speed up the process a bit.This will produce a list of sites that have links to their site.

And we'll bet that there will be some you have never found before, who might be prepared to carry a link to your site.

Always visit a potential cross-linking site before you contact the Webmaster of the site. That way you'll know what part of their site is suitable for carrying your link.

Happy surfing!

Note: we have another article on reciprocal linking, giving a different perspective. Click here to read it.

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