Nov 6th, 2007
Wikipedia as another traffic source for software web site
Wikipedia is one of the most visited resources on the Web. It’s built by people and for people. Many people from all over the world are looking for specific information on Wikipedia. The information they are looking for may be related to your software product.
Why not to turn the Wikipedia’s readers into your web site visitors and then into new users of your software? Link your web site from Wikipedia and receive several dozens of targeted visitors per day for free. Bellow, there are some hints how to do this.
Do it for people, not for search engines
Google seems to ignore incoming links from Wikipedia when calculating Page Rank for your web site. So it’s useless to link from Wikipedia to increase your Google Page Rank. There is no SEO in it. The main goal is attracting real people, not SE robots.
Start little
If your software product is popular then somebody likely has always created an article about you on Wikipedia and put a link to your web site in it. If your product is quite young and there are no articles about your software then you may look for articles that are relevant to your niche and add your link into References or Extras sections of them.
Observe the rules
Lurk for a while before adding your links into every article. See what links are appropriate and what kind of web sites are linked from Wikipedia. Try to add your link into a single relevant article first and wait for a couple of days to see if moderators accept or remove your contribution.
Monitor your competitors
Search for your competitors mentioned in the Wikipedia and try to add your plug into the same articles.
Be extremely relevant
Don’t add link to ‘ABC Super Audio Player’ into an article about ‘Jazz Music’. Otherwise, moderators will remove your contribution and may even ban your IP to prevent from future irrelevant contributions.
Link to information, not to infomercial
You can hardly add a link that points to the main page of your commercial product web site. I’m sure it will be rejected. You must give people really valuable information, not pure advertisement, and you must give it for free.
The appropriate information types on your website to link from Wikipedia are:
- Troubleshooting articles and white papers
- Statistical reports and analytics
- Freeware or open source tools and utilities
- Knowledge bases and How-To
- Tutorials
- Free on topic e-books and pod-casts
- … etc.
Name the link properly
The link title must be also relevant to the article topic. Look how other links are titled and name your one accordingly. Try to avoid directly mentioning you product in the title. It should not look like an ad.
Keep these simple points in your mind and you will see that being on Wikipedia is an easy way to get additional free and targeted traffic for your web site and, therefore, to increase the popularity of your product.
