1. Make You Site Excellent - The best way to get good PageRank to have a nicely designed site with plenty of useful information. For the most part the more useful information you have on your site the better.

2. Check to see how fast your website loads. You can check website statistic at Alexa (www.alexa.com) to find out how long it takes to load your homepage and what percentage of sites are faster than yours to load. I tested my homepage by checking how much faster my homepage would load after I remove some graphic from my home page and saw that Alexa the next day had updated the information. A web page should load in 20 seconds or less. You can often increase load time from 35 second down to 20 just by optimizing images. You can also test site speed at OptiView http://www.optiview.com

3. Get input from people you work with or people that are friendly to your non-profit organization. Ask friends to look at the site or your readers to give their opinion on how you can improve your site.

4. Make sure everything of the web site works and the links and navigation links work on the site. There are link checkers built into programs like DreamWeaver. There are also link checkers available on the web. A great tool that is not well known is Xenu http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. Mark Herre of 10x Marketing http://www.10xmarketing.com Check all your links both internal and external.

5. Make a good resource or link directory page. As you compile information for your site add web sites that you like to you link page.

6. Make a Site Map - The site map should list every page on your site. It can be used as a navigation system and it is used by The GooglesBot to crawl your site more efficiently and enables it to do it faster. Have a text link at the bottom of your homepage to you Site Map. You can use a program like Xenu to help make the site map. But there is a limitation on the amount of pages that it adds to the Site Map, so you may have to do some manual work. Xenu will highly reduce the necessary work if you have a large amount of pages.

7. Submit your site to the important directories such as Yahoo! and Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). For commercial sites it costs $299 to submit a commercial site to Yahoo and it is a fee that you have to pay annually. This fee is just to have Yahoo review you site and you will still have to pay it even if they reject your site, so it definitely pays to as much as possible work to have a useful, informative site. You first find a directory where you think you should be listed and then submit your application from that page. Yahoo is still the most popular site and portal on the Internet so a listing with them is considered very important. Another advantage to being listed in Yahoo! and Open Directory is that webmasters will often use these directories find sites that they can ask for a link from.

8. Then request a link from the Open Directory DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org). It is also compiled by human like Yahoo, but it is free to submit to. You can list in two categories, a general category and a local category. Google gets their directory information from DMOZ and they are still in the top 200 sites, so it is important to get a link from them. DMOZ may not be updated that much so it may take a while to get listed. Requesting a link from them is good step to increase link popularity.
9. Check the websites you already have on your link page to see what their Google PageRank are and how popular they are using Alexa. Then look for other website that have a similar theme as your website, but are not competition. Check to see what their PageRank (with the Google Toolbar) and their popularity (with Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com).

10. Then do searches in Google for similar terms that are included in your web site. Make a list of at least 50 web sites that you think are good to request a link from but are not competitors. Then check to see what PageRank they have in Google. It is best to first look for sites that have PageRank 5 or higher. and that rank below 500,000 on the Alexa Toolbar.

11. Then you should look at the site and record information about the site. The first thing I look is if they have a link page as they can give a good idea of sites on your similar subject. Then I look to see if they have any links on their site that I believe my reader would like. Then a put I put a link to their site on my Link Directory page. On Alexa Toolbar you can click “Related Links” to see what other sites people visit besides the site that you are looking at.

12. You should also check your competition’s sites link pages too.
13. Avoid less important site on Geocities and secondary sites that are listed under other sites (www.aol.com/clasicalmusic/) because these sites list the link and traffic information of the parent site and not the sub domain.

14. From similar sites to yours you can check the sites that are linking to that site by hitting the “Page Info” and then hitting “Backward Links.” If the web page has a high PageRank and not many links you can know that the web pages linking to that site have a high PageRank value. It is considered that if important websites link to you that your web site is also important.

15. Directories are good sites to get a link from as there are no conditions to get these links. They often have a place to enter a link and often we have it active in a day or two. You can looks for guides of the particular area you are in.

16. Find sites with similar themes, as search engines give more value to links to your site coming to your websites that have similar contents.

17. Search engine may also penalize your site if you have too many links from site that have nothing to do with you, especially if these site have been identified to be site farms. Search engines, when they penalize you look more to see what your intention is and not really the technique.

18. Affiliate research - when you see affiliates of your competition you will want to contact them and ask them to become your affiliate. Try to get 50 affiliates.

19. Combine all you list so you do not send out the same email to the same site a few different times. Make sure there are no duplications on your lists so you don’t contact them separately.
20. Send email asking for a link out to the various sites that you have listed.

21. Ask your suppliers to link to you and also people that you supply to link to you. I have seen some supplier do this as a matter of course so that people know where they can get their products and they want you to contact them. You should also link to them.

22. Look for popular sites. You get just one or two authoritative sites with a high PageRank to give you a link it can be more beneficial than 1,000 irrelevant links.

23. Contact the Webmaster of sites you want a link from and customize the letter for them. It is good idea not to send out impersonal email to get links. I know I really hate when I receive them, but on the other-hand I also have found some nice site to link to that have sent me impersonal letter, but not many.

24. Keep track of everything that you do and especially follow up on the sites that you like which have high PageRank. Make sure you have detailed records. Often people use a spreadsheet like Excel to do this work. You need three files, one for theme page research, one for competition and one for affiliate research.

25. Should contain company name, URL, Alexa Ranking, PageRank, Yahoo! inclusions, DMOZ inclusion. Google links, how the site looks, when you requested a links, when approved, when to check if they gave you a link and comments.

26. Make sure the people that said they would give you a link actually did. Many webmasters will agree to exchange links but in truth they never post your link. You may want to follow up every 30 days to get them to put a link that they said they would.

27. You may even consider calling the webmaster to request a link.

Searchengineguide.com (http://www.searchengineguide.com/)

B eaucoup.com (http://www.beaucoup.com) have a list of search engines.

Record Keeping for Links
When you keep track of the site you are considering asking to give you a link some thing you should keep track of are;

1. The name of the site
2. The URL
3. The name and email address of the person who manages the site
4. The dates you sent emails to the person managing the site and what response was given
5. What is worked out with the webmasters. Whether they agree or don’t agree to give you a link, if you want a link back, whether they want to change the description you have on your site about their site.
6. Whether a webmaster gave you a response and if not when you plan to re-contact them.
6. Confirm that they added you link.
7. Check their site yearly to make sure they are still linking to you.