The most difficult area of SEO is building link popularity. You may be thinking why? Because there are no easy ways to build link popularity. In this article I will tell you how to get links and how to find them.
First thing you must do is find a web site that you would like to trade links with. How do you find them? You can join link exchanges like www.linkexchangeit.com or you can search the search engine with keywords related to your site. Remember RELATED sites only! Let's say your site is about cars, so you would search with keywords like car body repair, car, SUVS, trucks, vans, etc or let's say your site is about games, so you would search with keywords like checkers, card games, chess, online games, etc. Now that you know what to do go and search for sites RELATED to yours and ask for a link exchange.
You could send them this email below if you like.
Dear (Put there name here),
Thanks for taking the time to read my email.
My name is (Put your full name here), I came cross your site today while I was searching on AOL and really like your site. I love the (put something here you like about there site here). Your site and our site is somewhat the same, so I was wondering if you would like to exchange links with our site (put your URL here). Our site is about (put what your site is about here).
By chance is your news section at http://www.there-web-site-here.com/news.html a good place that you could put my link at?
If you have any questions or need anything feel free to contact me at put-email@here.com or call me at (put area code here) 777-7777.
Try to find out the site owner's name and if they have a phone number listed on the site call that number, you will get much better results that way because they know you are not some spamming robot that emails every site they come a cross. Download Google's Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) to make sure that inbound links are from decent sites, with a minimum of 1 on the toolbar. The higher the PageRank the better. Also remember that your homepage is not the only part of your site that you can get links for, so try to get links to other pages on your site. This will allow robots to spider your site better and have more ways in.
Here is more tips on how to get more links to your site.
1) Link to them first
2) Put no more than 20 links on your links page if you use one.
3) Use categories on your links page.
Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.