Linking strategies are like opinions. Everyone who runs a blog has one. Some people will read this article and say, no way, that's not the way to do it. That's fine. There are many different ways to go about building links for your site. This is the strategy that has served me the best. Using this strategy, I'm managed to get hundreds upon hundreds of highly competitive keywords into top position, and I don't lose sleep at night worrying about whether or not Google is going to eliminate me from their results in the morning.

My linking strategy is the same strategy employed by some of the biggest, most successful blogs on the Internet, including Steve Pavlina's blog and Darren Rowse's blog. I can guarantee you that they don't lose sleep at night about their rankings either.

So what is this magical strategy? Some sort of uber-clever reciprocal linking scheme? A deep-linking system, where you link to someone's home page and they link back to a page buried deep within your site? Not at all.

My "secret" is that I don't exchange links at all.

My "secret" is that I write unique and (hopefully) useful content, and let the links come when people decide that my articles are useful and link to them from their sites. My "secret" is that eventually, if I write enough strong content, someone will like it enough to submit it to a social bookmarking site, and other people will bookmark it as well and I'll obtain even more links.

This strategy is certainly a long-term strategy, but once you start building up one-way links pointing at your site, the traffic is nearly impossible to turn off. Ask Steve Pavlina. He just writes very high quality content that gets a ton of backlinks because people find his content very useful. He now makes upwards of $40k a month off of his site due to the strength of his backlinks. He doesn't have a reciprocal linking scheme, and the search engines love him for that. If Google sees that you have 400-500 links pointing towards your site, you are golden.

Now, does this mean you should never link to other sites? Of course not. I recommend linking to other sites. In this article alone, I included three links to sites other than this one. It is healthy, search engines like it, and it's recommended.

What you shouldn't do (in my opinion) is look to have a reciprocal link exchange with other sites. Meaning, I'll link to your site from my front page, and you link back to mine. In my opinion, based on making money online for almost ten years now, you will do much better in the long-run if you just focus on writing really good content and let the backlinks come naturally. The good thing is that search engines really like it when other sites deep-link your site (meaning, they link to a subpage on your site.) So, if you write really strong content, and other sites link to your articles, you will be golden in the long-run. By doing this, you will establish yourself as an authority site, and you will be unbelievably strong in the search engines and almost guarantee yourself a steady flow of traffic for the long-term.

So you have just started a blog? Don't waste your time looking for reciprocal link exchanges. Write really strong content and your site will benefit much more in the long-run because of it.

Filed under: Making Money Online | General Knowledge

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