The most important web marketing tip

At least once a week I'm asked about how to drive more traffic to a web site.

I've been thinking about a variety of things that can help. Future articles will probably include web site entry points, and tools for marketing your web site.

This article will deal with the single most important thing to do to get your web site to show up in the search engines.

The Single Most Important Thing: In-bound links

Do you have a friend that has a web site? Good. Have them link to you.
Do you know someone in the same industry as you but is not a direct competitor? Even better! Ask them if they'll link to you.

The best link you can have pointed at your website is one from a web site of the same type.

I'll give you an example.

If you want to sell widgets, it might be a good idea to get widget reviewers to link to you. The search engines are getting savvy enough to recognize keyword "markets", meaning you don't want links from ding dongs if you are selling widgets.

The joke is implied. In general, you don't want ding dongs linking to you.

Beware! There are dangers for you linking back to web sites that use bad marketing practices (known as spamming the search engines - aka, the aforementioned ding dongs).

Sending an email a day to another web site owner is a very good practice. Look at their site. Be nice to them. Ask if they'll link to you. If not? Maybe they'd like to exchange links. You can link to them, and they can link to you.

The long term benefits of these types of link exchanges are invaluable for the success of your web marketing campaign.

So go get some links!

If you start to tire of the manual process of e-mailing and link exchanges, try out some software called LinkMachine. They have a free version that I use on this site, and it's worked out quite nicely.

If you don't know what links are, check out Google's definition of hyperlinks.