Promotion Techniques Don't Have To Be A Hassle
Are you tired of writing countless eMails to other webmasters
asking for a link exchange with your new website just to see
them being deleted by a spam filter or just ignored? Or don't
you want to go through many manual directory submissions again
just to get some links and therefore potential visitors to your
homepage? Then one of the many different programs that automate
or simplify the process of building links to your site might be
what you are looking for. However, since those services are
available in many different kinds of flavor and some of them
might even damage your sites ranking instead of helping it, this
article will now take a deeper look at some of the more
important programs to help you decide which could help your
websites best.
1. Link Vault - http://www.link-vault.com/
This one is a fairly new player in the field however it's system
looks like one of the best and I know of many people (including
myself) who had very pleasant results with it. The basic concept
works like this: You add a little php script to your sites that
will automatically place links to sites of other members in the
system on your website. For those links you get a certain amount
of points (called Vaultage) based on how many links you give and
how valuable they are. Your points are then again automatically
spent to add your links to the other websites in the system.
That means you always get back exactly what you gave.
2. Coop Advertising Network - http://www.d
igitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/ The Coop could be the
predecessor of Link Vault. The system is nearly exactly the same
except that the Coop is much older and therefore has many more
members, that the points are called Wight instead of Vaultage
here, that you can choose to also show banner ads and that the
links are not static but rotate every time the site is refreshed
(Which makes them not nearly as valuable for search engine
optimization as the Link Vault links are). In the end its down
to personal preference if you decide to use the Coop or Link
Vault. They are both good and have both prooven themselves to
work.
3. Link Market - http://www.linkmarket.net/
Link Market works in a totally other way: When you are a member
your site will be placed in a directory where other webmasters
can find it and request a link exchange immediately. Of course
you can request link exchanges with other sites in the directory
as well. Link Market will then help finishing the exchange by
providing the link codes and testing if the links have been
placed correctly. A good concept but some big problems I have
found are that there are very many spammy sites in there and
that they require you get a paid membership even for the most
simple features. It might still be worth a try though.
4. Link Metro - http://www.linkmetro.com/
Works exactly like Link Market but you get all the features
without paying anything. In exchange it doesn't have as many
members as Link Market does by far. 5. Got Links? - http://gotlinks.com/ I would
highly recommend staying away from this one (or any program with
a similar concept) as this is what is considered a "link farm"
by search engines and using them could get you penalized or even
banned from them. What they do is to just setup a big directory
at your website that links to all other sites in the system. In
exchange all those sites link to you from their directories. As
I've said, it's not worth a try. Your link wouldn't be found in
those deeps directories anyway.
Of course there are many others around, most of which work in a
similar fashion like one of the programs above, and some of
which could possibly even hurt your site. But as long as you
decide to use the right ones they can not only generate great
results but also save you loads of work.