Developing a proactive marketing strategy that will provide a consistent stream of good quality web traffic is not an impossible task. To get traffic you need a significant presence and to gain a presence you need firstly a good site that Google can read and understand, and secondly a network of high quality links to your website from many other authority websites.

Although this sounds quite difficult and complex, reasonably easy to achieve because of all the systems that are around that can do it for you. First though, you need to grasp the concept that not all links are equal. Google Page Rank is a good indicator of how much a link from a given site will be worth. Google ranks pages 0-10, 0 being the least valuable sites that is knows about, and 10 being the most valuable and popular sites. Below rank 0 or n/a means either that Google isn’t aware of the sites existance or that you should avoid that site because it has been blacklisted.

In an ideal world we would all get links from the home pages of PR 10 websites. The problem with that strategy is that there are only about 10 PR 10 sites world wide, and unsurprisingly they are mostly unwilling to give links to anyone bold enough to ask. This means that we have to find our links from lower PR sites. Even finding PR 7 and 8 sites that will give us links is difficult, they themselves are very popular authority websites and as such they as choosy as to who they link to and who they dont.

What you’re aiming to do it to get links from as many of the highest PR websites as you possibly can, and/or from new sites with no PR yet, but that show potential to have a good PR in the future (basically sites that are building links to promote themselves). Looking out for sites like these is a good long term strategy to undertake because you never know what sites will have high PR in a few months / a year or so’s time.

So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.

The most effective way to get to the top of the search engines is through one way linking, or to put it another way, getting good websites to link to you without you linking back to them. This, as you can imagine, is not easy. Why would a quality site link to you anyway? Some might actually like your website, service or information and link to it as a reference for their own visitors, but in the main they will want something in exchange for the link.

You may have some difficulty with this if you only have one website, or if you have two that are hosted in the same place, they’ll have the same IP address and so it will look to search engines as if they are they the same site. The are lots of solutions to this problem, but one way links are definately the most effective.

Effectively, your site is entered into a triangular arrangment where your site (site A) links to site B, which then links to site C, which then links back to site A (your site) this is beneficial to each site to the value of one one-way link. The big search engines cannot trace these links and so they reward you with a big push up the results rankings.