According to my Google Webmaster Central Tools I have a total of 15,937 links to my site. 4,523 of them go to my homepage while the remaining 11,414 go to various pages on my site. My last sitemap indicated that I have 34,789 pages of content on my website so, excluding the homepage, I have about one link for every three pages of content.

I think it’s important to also note that I don’t do any link buying and never tell people what anchor text to use when they link to me. I always suggest that they use whatever text they feel best describes the page they are linking to on my site (if everyone links to you with the same anchor text you can get penalized from Google).

Looking through the links I have to my site I noticed a few interesting sites that you might be able to leverage for your own website. Note that I have never actually gone out and asked these sites to link to me - I was added because one of my readers thought the content was useful enough to post.

An aggressive entrepreneur could use these websites, however, to promote their own business and gain additional links.

Wikipedia.org

While the links from Wikipedia are “nofollow” (Google doesn’t recognize them as giving you Page Rank) they do help drive traffic to your site. My site is currently listed on Wikipedia for a number of terms including: Cold Calling, Fredrick W. Smith (FedEx founder), and Ray Croc (McDonald’s founder). I’m even listed as a resource for List of Hungarian Articles for an article on Steven Spielberg (I’m not Hungarian or American).

StumbleUpon

I added my site to StumbleUpon when I first heard about the service. I saved and tagged a few articles but gave up after I didn’t see immediate results. I’m glad my readers continued to Stumble my articles! StumbleUpon continues to send me traffic every day - one week they even sent me over 5,000 page views! I’m now looking at how to get more of my pages listed in StumbleUpon as it has proved to be an effective source of traffic.

Craigslist

I run a series of events for Toronto entrepreneurs and often post them on Craigslist. The postings send me qualified, targeted traffic and the listings often get ranked alongside my own site for the keywords that describe the event. It’s free to put up a post on Craigslist and they have a massive audience to promote yourself to.

del.icio.us

Again, with del.icio.us I signed up an account a long time ago, posted my site and forgot about it. As it has increased in popularity a number of my readers have now bookmarked sections of the site and I get links and traffic every day from new members who are expanding their del.icio.us profiles. In looking through the list, one of them even includes MarkChg who bookmarked the profile I did on Young Entrepreneur Founders Adam and Matthew Toren!

Kiva

Kiva is a microfinancing organization that lets you lend out money to entrepreneurs in developing countries (all loans are interest-free). I launched an initiative called SEO for Africa here in Toronto where I give workshops on SEO and the proceeds go to support entrepreneurs in Africa through Kiva. Kiva allows you to set up a profile so we did one for SEO for Africa. On the profile you can include a link back to your site and now it’s sending us traffic every day. By doing good deeds you can also help build your website traffic!

Mr. Wong

Mr. Wong is another bookmarking site. They call themselves “Master of all bookmarks.” My site has been tagged (again, not by me) for business keywords like hrm management. I also ended up on there for Cinderella!

Business.com

While directories traditionally haven’t been a good source of links or traffic for me, Business.com seems to be one of the exceptions. It could be because they are highly targeted on the business community and because they didn’t seem to be effected by Google’s recent crackdown on poor quality directories. I don’t actually remember signing up to get my site listed but I’m sure that I didn’t pay for it so all in all it’s been a good experience. Some directories still carry some weight and are worth submitting to.

I hope this post have given you some out of the box ideas on how to build links and drive traffic. And remember - I never actually went out to aggressively promote myself through these sites so with a little bit of effort you should be able to yield some results.

Which sites do you get interesting links from?

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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