The Art & Science of Obtaining Inbound Website Links

Ever wonder how to build incoming links to your website? In the "old days" you would simply find a site related to yours and ask for a link. In today's "what's in it for me?" society, it's not that easy anymore. Link popularity, as it's often referred to, is important to ranking well with the search engines. Most search engines use it as a factor when determing your page rank. Basically, it's an indicator of how many other sites are linking to yours. If you have a lot of incoming links, the search engines think to themselves that your site must be pretty good and will give you a boost. Here's a handy tool for checking on incoming links to your website... http://www.Blogger.com 3) Discussion Boards: Believe it or not, most posts to discussion boards do get indexed by the search engines. Again, use a good signature line in your postings. I'm still surprised to this day when I do a search at Google and find a comment I posted to a board months earlier. 4) Press Releases: Writing and submitting press releases online is often overlooked when it comes to linking. If you submit your releases to places like http://PRWeb.com they'll be archived for the world to see for a very long time. If you do a search for "f-ree press releases" you'll find plenty of other similar sites that accept press release submissions. For more information on using press releases to help with your search engine optimization, see: http://www.pandia.com/features/pressrelease.html 5) Ezine Archives: If you publish an ezine, you should be posting your back issues online. Since your ezine should always contain links back to your website, this insures an additional stream of incoming links. If you buy ezine ads in newsletters, make sure they post their back issues online so you can benefit from an indefinite link. 6) Natural Linking: Let's face it, the goal of most websites is to provide quality content. Do that and you'll find other sites naturally linking to yours due to the good information that you provide. You won't have to ask for a link, they'll just do it on their own. Here's a great article on this: