One of the best ways to rise in search engine listings is to include a lot of links to your site from other sites – especially well-rated or relevant ones. Feel free to linking to your competitors as well – but only if you think it will help your users find what they need. Remember: Online, traffic adds up. Sending someone from your site to information they want on another site can come back to benefit you in many ways.
- Get links from others. You can ask others to link to you, trade links with them, send e-mails around when you have good content for your community to link to, and link out to others who may see that you’ve done so and return the favor. When someone links to you, it helps if their link contains good keywords. Consider sending them a sample link with proper page URLs and text.
- Offer RSS feeds. Consider using RSS feeds as a way to send your content to others to include on their sites either directly or through widgets they can place on their sites through services like Springwidgets. Feedburner can help you get more mileage out of the feed that your blogging platform or content management system automatically creates. Also, your feeds can also help your users read your content on widely available feed readers like Google Reader and My Yahoo – and even on mobile devices (like cell phones) or on laptop computers when they’re not connected to the Internet.
- Add clickable “chicklets” to your site. These tiny clickable buttons allow users to receive your headlines and content in their feed readers and blogs with one click. Many blog publishing tools used by citizen media sites offer libraries of such tools, such as the widget library at Typepad.com. Don’t forget to include links to social and bookmarking services like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and, of course, Facebook and MySpace.
- Get on relevant lists. Try to get your site included on relevant Web indexes, list sites, other aggregator sites, etc. – wherever you think people from your community or interest group might look.
- Post comments. Contribute your thoughts to blogs or in forums with links back to your site, if you have something relevant to say. This will demonstrate your expertise, get interest from other bloggers, and ultimately encourage people to visit your site directly.
- Tag photos and videos on sharing sites. Take advantage of social media sites like Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Metacafe, which allow you to upload content like pictures and videos with your site name and related keywords, helping to extend your site’s searchability.
- Don’t pay for listings. They are expensive and may not help. However, do look at the search engines’ help pages to see how and whether to submit pages for free (here’s the appropriate help page from Yahoo, for instance). You can also submit to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org), which may help.