Art Of Money

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Today’s tip is a nifty one that I learned by watching some clever people employ it around my sites.

We all know about the 2-fold power of an incoming link to your site as:

1. A direct source of traffic
2. A “vote” in the search engines for your site

Let’s imagine that you’re just like most stats addicted webmasters and you see a new incoming link show up in your stats or WordPress’s dashboard.

You check out the site and think “much coolness, another small step in my march towards market domination.”

But besides having an ego-glow moment, there are a couple other small steps you could take to turbo charge the value of that new incoming link.

Backfill The Link

Backfilling is something that when I saw it in action amazed me. Here’s how it worked…

I linked to a site off of my other blog. The person I linked to went out and commissioned 3 pay per post articles all pointing to my page with the anchor text that best matched the primary keywords of my post.

Why wouldn’t they just purchase links to their own site? Simple, my site was a trusted site, by pointing a couple (even low quality links at a particular page) it was likely that my site would now rank highly for their keywords, and since my article linked to their site, they would now have accomplished a boost for both of the two link valuations above.

With this brilliant strategy they now had potentially doubled the value of that incoming link. Since now both my site (which directed traffic towards their site) and their site (because I linked to it) could both be ranking well for their term.

Fortifying The Article

Fortifying is a very similar technique and it has the power to work the same magic as backfilling only with exponential results.

For this one when you find a story with a link to your site, and then bookmark it on Stumble or Digg. Take some time, write a great headline and intro, then ask all your friends to help you increase it’s popularity.

If you’re lucky the story gets to the front page or to the popular list and the person who wrote it gets a whack of traffic…some of them link to the article (which does the backfill work for you) and/or they click through and discover your site and you have a new reader and someone who may also link to your site.

A possible exponential boost to your traffic and rankings just by helping someone who was kind enough to mention you on their site.

Increasing Search Engine Traffic Action Steps

Watch those stats and take full advantage of any new interesting incoming links.

You want to pay particular attention to any links originating from high quality or easily bookmarkable (like lists or top 10s) articles. Especially look for ones where the writer has used keywords in the anchor text.

I’ve seen people on numerous occasions bookmark stories that I’ve written, just because they had links in the articles and it has turned out very well for their traffic as well as my own.