Linking is a big topic in website promotion today. I think and write about linking quite a bit since venturing into the website business. Mind you, I am an amateur in all respects but I have gained a tremendous amount of experience. (good and bad).

Last month I wrote and published an article titled “Linking – This is it”. Do a search on that exact group of words and you will find it at several locations. The point of that article was to identify what we truly should expect to get from good linking and a few little pointers regarding the physical aspect of placing links on our websites. Also I talked about why and how everyone can benefit and receive traffic from good linking practices. Benefits are not limited to the select 10 or 20 that appear in the first two pages of Google.

I need to talk about the practices to get all those quality links that will actually send us traffic. I like to make use of a link finding and link page creation tool. My particular choice is Arelis. I use it to help find potential links and then I use it to create the link directories and files. I don’t use all the features available. Finding a whole big list of potential partners and sending mass emails just Does Not Work. I let the program find those potential partners and then the real work begins for me. I review every website. I want to see three things or the site will likely fail. I want to see a clear text link that takes me to the links pages. I want to see a searchable link directory. Directories are usually large now. To have a chance at finding my service or product – that search tool is the biggest tool to accomplish the job. And the next you may wonder about. I want to be able to submit my link directly from their website. This is the only way that you will guarantee yourself that your link gets to that website. You don’t need to rely on replies from bad email addresses. Have you ever sent out about 100 emails to addresses derived from websites . How many actually produced anything?

I will manually go through the whole list of potential link partners that my link search produced. I might find 8 out of 80 that I except. The remainder gets dumped. This is a bunch of effort but the effort you expend will not be wasted. It will produce a predictable result. That is the first method to develop good links early in your website’s life.

Once you have reached a point where you receive some traffic another capability kicks into gear. You can now move to a link management program that allows visitors to place links on your site directly. Now you can allow direct link submission to your website. There is no advantage to this feature until you are getting some traffic.

All of this might sound like a lot of work. It is a lot of work. It is not a bunch of wasted work though. The results will be predictably positive because you hand picked those links and then you submitted them directly to the partners link directory. This guarantees you a quality linking program.

Tom Henricks is an amateur webmaster who has written a few website promotion articles that have been published to the internet. He operates a website for marketing of many products that include common household needs, websites development and promotion software and more. You can visit his website at http://www.tomsvirtualmall.com

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