If you are trying in increase your web traffic, and get better rankings in the search engines, you need to find quality link partners. It is important that you note the word ‘quality’ in that statement. Linking to 1000 low quality sites won’t do you much good in terms of search engine rankings, and it probably won’t do any good in terms of increased web traffic either. You have to be very choosy about the sites that you associate yourself with.

There is a way to automate your linking campaign, but that automation can have you linked to low quality sites if you aren’t careful. This doesn’t mean that you cannot automate your linking campaign – you can – but there is a right way and a wrong way to automate if you want quality link partners.

Start finding quality link partners by making sure that your site is a quality site. Otherwise the other quality sites won’t want a link from you either! Your site must offer something of value to your link partner’s visitors. Simple sales sites won’t do. You need quality content, and you need your content to be optimized for the search engines. Potential link partners will be interested in your Google page rank and your Alexa ranking, so you need to work on getting those higher. Of course, quality linking partners contribute to higher Google page ranks and Alexa rankings!

The next step is to visit the top 100 sites that are related to your website – without being direct competitors. Finding these sites is simple. Using Google, search for the keywords that may be used for the sites that you have in mind. Look at the first 100 sites that are listed, and visit each of those websites. It may take a couple of weeks, depending on how much time you have, but you need to contact each of those site owners personally to ask for a link partnership. You can usually contact the site owner from an email link on the site, by looking for the contact information at Alexa or by using Whois.com

With that out of the way, you need to set your site up for automated linking. There are many scripts available for this purpose, and many hosting accounts include linking software that can be installed with the push of a button. Get your linking script set up, and set it to require approval of all links submitted. Approving the links is not automated – but this is how you make sure that you are only getting quality links. Each time someone requests to be added to your link directory, visit their site personally to ensure that it is a site that you want to be linked to.

The rest of the linking campaign is automated. You can set most scripts to verify that your link has been added, and you can have it check periodically to ensure that your link is still on the websites of your linking partners. You can even have the script email those link partners if it cannot find your link on their sites, and remove the partners link after a set number of days if the other website owners does not put your link back where it belongs!

There are also services that you can use to find link partners. Again, you must tread carefully here to ensure that you are getting quality link partners. Never just allow links to be added automatically to your link directory! For services that will help you find other people interested in link partnerships, check out the following websites:

Linkmarket
123exchangelinks
linkalizer