Subscribing to the famous and reliable directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, LookSmart and so on, is something any Webmaster can do to achieve links of repute. The trick lies in looking beyond what is easily available and linking with winners who do not really know you yet. Your website must reflect substance and that is what you must work at to begin with, literally speaking.
Stylish and/ or out of the box graphics are not imperative to success. Nice and pleasing ones will do. Emphasize on factual, authentic, informative and articulate content optimized to give maximum but meaningful and useful web pages. All web pages must be well connected to the each other and in each case to the home page – the site should be highly navigable and menus well organized. In gist, visitors to your website should be able to travel across your website quite intuitively and find it useful – that is left impressed by the website in short!
Once your website is optimized in itself to please the visitor, it is time to find the “winners” who can be linked with without harming the business. Relevancy is the keyword while linking. But of course, not everybody related to your business is worth linking with. Sporting an outbound link from your competitor website, though related, will filter your visitors onto him, thereby draining all your efforts to vain. So, the strategy is to approach relevant but non-competing webmasters – the tip is to search Google etc. for regionally filtered vertically-related websites, preferably with added text “add link” or “submit link” or “suggest link”.
Once you have the list of sites of interest, it’s for you to decide which ones deserve your proposal for link exchange. Shortlist 10-15 sites at a time and look for respective suggest link form. If not found, send a concise link request email. On similar lines, you can also publish a suggest link form at your website, though it may bear fruits only once you gather a good track record.
After the request, it is time to slow down and await response patiently. Upon a decent interval of days, you may start sending a new batch of requests to another fifteen links of relevance. Keeping the sites to be approached numbered thus, clears you out of the ’suspicious websites’ bracket from the point of view of the search engine, as otherwise links in hordes may attach to you in a rather short span of time. There is no reason to be discouraged by a rather lukewarm response to your requests. It only indicates need of improvements in the content of your request email.
Apart from seeking, it is important to use bait for link-exchange. In simpler words, circulate compelling well-written articles, blogs and press releases across web containing a link to your website. As these link-baits will be extensively read or discussed on the web, your website will develop advantageous one-way links automatically. To be emphasized is good content and intelligent use of keywords within the articles and blog entries for desired results.
