Secret #5 - Become the Information Hub

How do you or your organization achieve expert status?

Your website can become an information hub that others want to link to if you work at creating quality content and letting people know it is there. The act of trying to get people to link to your site is called a Link Campaign, and successful link campaigns can change an unknown website into an important information hub where people go for expert information.

Warning: Many unethical marketers will try to sell you many links for a set price. This service is called a Link Farm and should be avoided. Using this kind of service is more likely to hurt your search engine ranking and it will not produce targeted visitors.

Instead, you can create inbound links (to your site) by the following techniques.

Ask people to link to you
Ask business partners to link to you
Ask similar sites to link to you
Develop content that people want to read and link to
Create links by mentioning your site when you create content in other places
Write articles and post them to article repositories, with the appropriate links back to your site.
Post thoughtful comments in blogs with links back to your website.

You can also hire most SEO companies to conduct credible link campaigns for you. Outstanda offers this service, and it is just a matter of sitting down and identifying the best targets and contacting them, and asking them to link to your site. Results vary based on the quality of the site and your willingness to link back to them.

Before you start creating a lot of links out to people, keep in mind that the value of your site may be adversely affected if you have a lot of outbound links. Some search engines lower your ranking if you appear to be creating too many irrelevant outbound links.