You have worked hard to optimize your website, picked a niche keyword to work on and have exhausted all SEO strategies you know. While your efforts may work initially, you soon realize that your site ranking seems to have hit a roof. As your ranking increases, it becomes harder and harder for you to move your search engine rankings. What could be wrong?

Check your competitors
First, run a quick search with the keyword you are trying to optimize. Check out the sites that are listed on the first two pages of your search results. Then, check the number of incoming links these sites are getting. To do this, just key in the URL of each site on the search engine field, or type “link:abc.com”. The latter usually returns a fewer number of results.

Now, do the same for your site’s URL and compare. Are you way behind in the number of links you are getting? This could be the reason why it’s difficult getting your site optimized.

So, what is their secret strategy?
These sites encourage incoming links to their site with banners coded with their site URL and keywords they wish to optimize. An example of one such site would be Next Day Pets. In exchange for a listing in their popular directory, they provide a website banner with coding to be incorporated in other websites.

All webmasters need to do is to copy the HTML code and paste it on their site. At first glance, this seems like a pretty innocent banner – a nice graphic to be included on any pet-related website.

Upon further scrutiny however, you’ll find loads of keywords and links to various pages on NextDayPets.com. So, in exchange for just ONE link in their directory, they get multiple links back to their website from yours.

Is there a violation here?
Well, using such a strategy to get incoming links may seem unethical to most people. However, this method does not seem to violate Google’s spam abuse policies and references. All HTML code is visible to the webmaster who pastes this on his website. NextDayPets.com did not attempt to hide any of their code in the banner. Therefore, their actions CANNOT be classified as spam.

How can you work around this?

At the end of the day, incorporating links into banners is just another linking
strategy. In fact, it has been in use for quite some time now.

Essentially, incoming links to our website are still an essential factor in determining our search engine ranking. It is also up to us to decide which link building strategy we want to use to encourage others to link to us. This is as long as these strategies are legal, and that we are comfortable with the ethical aspects of them.

With this, we could also then give away stuff for free, in exchange for a link or HTML link codes to be placed on other sites. Another way to generate traffic is probably to optimize a niche keyword, or several niche keywords. As you won’t be competing with the big boys, it
becomes easier for you to get top rankings.

Finally, if this won’t do, you could perhaps buy your way through with Pay-per-click advertising. Obviously, this would be a costlier option.

About Samantha Tang
Samantha Tang runs http://www.what-sells-online.com, a blog that explores the various products, opportunities and methods available to make money online. Samantha also shares her experience on areas of search engine optimization, traffic generation and affiliate marketing, essential aspects in turning any online business into a success.