Here's a fairly obvious Multi Linking Strategy that is probably the easiest and most effective one you can employ. I call it...
Power Publishing on Your Own Site
The basic idea is simply to create lots of pages on your site(s) and embed links pointing back to your most important target pages. This works because a link pointing at a page on your site -- your home page, for instance -- enhances that page whether it is coming from outside or inside your site.
Think about how this might work if you had one or two secondary or support sites. Build some content on Sites B and C pointing back to pages on Site A. Isn't that a lot easier (and much more powerful) than wasting time asking anonymous webmasters for links on their spammy link pages?
Create big batches of content pages
The best application of this strategy involves creating big batches of content pages. Please bear in mind that I am not advocating the creation of SPAM pages -- meaningless jibberish filled with keywords and links. I am talking about creating useful, readable content pages. The important thing is that your new pages be optimized for the type of content you want to promote. This will reinforce the page or pages you are pointing back to. That way, embedded links pointing back to those target pages will have more force. They will be more "relevant" because the context in which they are found will be "relevant" to your target page(s).
For instance, say the home page of your primary site is about business card displays". Create a bunch of content pages on all your sites with heavily optimized link text pointing directly back to your primary home page. Use your new pages to talk about various aspects of your business card displays: the construction, the design, the features, the cost, the comparison with competitors, and so on. This is information you should have anyway. Just turn it into new pages. Don't worry about design. That can come later if it bothers you.
Pretty simple wouldn't you say?
Two kinds of content pages: articles and "tips"
I normally think in terms of two basic kinds of "content pages" that are easily created: article pages and tips pages. I'm sure you can think of others. Both of these formats ("articles" and "tips") lend themselves to being done in what I have called batches. By "batches" I mean instead of writing one super duper (overly long?) article about, say, Search Engine Optimization or Dog Grooming -- whatever you want to promote -- you can write five or six (or twenty-five or twenty-six) shorter articles.
Remember, Google see links on specific pages -- at least that's what gets reported -- so you might as well create five or six pages instead of only one.
In other words, don't write just one or two articles about Dog Grooming. Write a whole bunch. Narrow down your focus and expand little insignificant points. The truth is, people can't retain more than a skimpy little bit of information with each read anyway.
Put your batches into sections
That means you should end up with article sections. A section for this topic, and a section for that topic. And a bunch of articles in each section with links pointing at your most important target pages.
You can see how well the concept of "tips" fits this formula. No matter what area you are involved in, you can create all kinds of little helpful tips and publish them on your website. Put each tip on a separate page, and make sure you embed your links within relevant keyword-rich text with anchor text pointing back to your most important target pages.
1000 Trade Show Tips
For example, I have just started creating a new feature called b>1000 Trade Show Tips. Each tip will have at least two keyword-rich links pointing back to the two most important target pages inside one of the relevant sites. That's a lot of links. You can do the math.
It's also a lot of work. First I have to find the content, and then I have to properly organize it.
Here is what I am doing for my 1000 Tips section. I am starting out by taking some of my previously written articles and lifting paragraphs from them. In other words, I am turning each paragraph into a "tip". Believe it or not this more or less works. I have to tweak each paragraph so it makes sense, but that is relatively easy. In the end, each article produces about 20 meaningful tips. 50 articles and I've got my 1000 tips. I will also make sure I write my future articles this way -- so that each paragraph more or less stands by itself as a "tip".
Organize your content pages to make it easy to create more
Finally, a comment on organization. I've tried quite a few different ways of organizing articles (content pages), and most have been cumbersome and hard to work with. What is required is a simple script that lets you enter your articles and tips into a web form and that then posts them in pages formatted according to a preset template. No fuss, no muss.
I spent quite a bit of time looking for this kind of script over the last little while. I investigated "Content Management Systems", "Article Managers", and "Blog" software, but most have two major drawbacks:
1. They are overkill for what I am after -- too much setup, and too many options. All I want is a way of posting and indexing articles in several sections.
2. They post the articles to a database and do not usually create static (.html) pages. Yes, I know some systems do create static html pages, but I have not yet found one I like. I also know that various Google experts claim dynamic pages ultimately get indexed. But my experience is that static pages get indexed more often and more quickly.
The little script I settled on is called Article Manager 02. It consists of about five files. Like most .php scripts you have to do some configuring. In my case I modified the templates to give me the look I wanted, and then created five or six different sections with an integrated index.
To post articles you go to a very simple article entry form. You enter your article (html works perfectly), and it gets posted to its own static page (in my case a .shtml page). A summary of the article gets posted to the index page. So you end up with a summary page with titles, dates, short summaries of all the articles. It's very simple and very neat. I posted 15 articles this morning in about an hour and a half.
Of course you can organize your articles any way you want. In fact you don't need a complicated system at all. You can just put them all in one folder and create an index page pointing to each of them. Then each time you want to add to your articles, just put a new one in the folder and add its link to the index page. But be sure to link the index page to all the key pages within your website. If you don't link it, none of the articles will get spidered and you will not gain any search engine ranking as a result of having them on your site.
Rick Hendershot is a marketing consultant, writer, and internet publisher who lives in Conestogo, Ontario, Canada. He publishes several websites and blogs, including Small-Business-Online.com, SuperCharge Your Website with Multi-Linking, and many more.