Backlinks from high quality web sites boost SEO rankings as as well as can potentially drive a very significant amount of traffic to your web site. All you may need is one Kardashian to dramatically change the traffic figures on your web site (But choose your Kardashian or Key Opinion Leader (KOL) carefully).

Generating quality back-links from websites, blogs and other online destinations to drive traffic to the website and increase your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking can be a time consuming and frustrating task. The trick to making this a long term, qualified traffic growth strategy is to build links from high quality, relevant sites to your web site and return the favor by linking back as well as to other industry related sites, authorities, etc. Usually calling this page “Resources”, creating a small snippet of content about their site, and being genuine that these links ARE actually resources, you can drive cross traffic between your sites for mutual benefit.

To do this properly, you need to find people willing to surf the internet looking for these high quality sites, finding contact email addresses and introducing yourselves to the recipient and respectfully requesting a link or even a review of your site. Add that you would be glad to do the same in return since you seem to both be targeting the same visitors. For example, if you are a staffing firm, you may want to approach companies that make HRMS/HRIS software used to corporate HR departments. For people doing this work, I usually put together a set of Acceptable Link Guidelines in order to ensure the link exchange is worth the effort and has a return on investment.

Example Link Exchange Acceptable Link Guidelines*:

1. Page on which link exists must be cached by Google.
2. Page on which link exists features 150 outbound links or less.
3. Site in which link is placed features no more than 25,000 links.
4. Site in which link is placed is not blacklisted or identified as a SPAM site.
5. Links must last a minimum of 90 days. Obviously, you are looking for maximum life span.
6. Links should be on domains that are registered in the locations of interest (country of origin for domestic marketing, international sites as targeted by your marketing plan.).
7. Link page should not have junk links or unrelated links.
8. Site in which link is placed should be theme-based and not a directory.
9. Linking sites should have different class C IP addresses.
10. Linking domain should not be redirected to another address.
11. Page where our link is located should not redirect to a different domain.
12. There must be a direct link to our site in spite of having certain redirects.

These are the minimum criteria. The criteria may be changed as needed. Obviously, a great way to create high quality backlinks is to review these other sites and their products honestly and authentically (so don’t bother with a site that you think has a terrible product or service even if the site is popular). Reviews are highly sought after by most industry web sites and even Facebook enables company pages to feature reviews. So get out there and find those symbiotic companies actively attracting your target market and look for ways you can work together to drive traffic to each other. It’s a total win-win for you both.

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