Link Building Strategies – 8 Basic Techniques for getting links

Linking is one of the most important components of increasing traffic to your web site. Here are 8 simple methods to get links to your site:

1. Links are a contract term: Any time you sign a contract with a new business partner, include in the agreement a requirement that they must link to your site.
2. Web-based PR: Promote your site using conventional PR! We like to use PRWeb because they are inexpensive, and offer great access to news directories, as well as conventional magazine editors.
3. Use URL Wire to launch a site: Eric Ward’s URL Wire is a great way to announce the launch of a new site.
4. Start a Blog: Blogs are a great way to recruit links. Be careful though. Keep the commerciality low. Also, make sure you learn how to use tags, and plug it into Technorati. You can read our article on Blogging SEO tactics for more information.
5. Ask Visitors to the Site to Link to you: Keep it reasonable. Don’t bury them with the “link to us” message. But if they want to give you a link, make it easy.
6. Implement RSS feeds: If you have a blog, or publish article regularly, you can syndicate the articles, or synopses of the articles (better) using an RSS feed. This helps increase your exposure. Also, you can submit to 20 or so RSS feed directories, each of which is good for a link.
7. Submit to Quality Directories: Pick quality directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (ODP), and submit listings to them. There are others that are good too. Best of the Web is also decent.
8. Ask for Links from other Sites: Make lists of sites that you would like links from. Keep them highly relevant to your business. Contact them and show them why linking to your site would be beneficial to their visitors.But learn the Can-SPAM rules, and play by them. Don’t know what Can SPAM is? You can learn more about Can-SPAM here. Read it, or better yet, have your lawyer read it.

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An underlying key to all linking strategies is that you must have great on-page content. If there is nothing special about your site, why would someone link to it? People don’t link to you for your benefit, they link to you because they think your content will benefit their site visitors. They do not see the opportunity to buy your product as a benefit. They want articles, facts, information, humor – something of unique value.
There are, of course, things that you should not do too:

1. Purchase links: Don’t buy text links for purposes of increasing your search engine traffic. If you want to buy them, buy them solely for purposes of the traffic you get from the other site. Chances are the search engines will not credit them to you anyway.
2. Swap links with non-relevant sites: This is a clear waste of time. Search engines easily recognize link swaps, and unless the site is highly relevant to yours, the links are of no value. In fact, too many of them can hurt your rankings.
3. Be obsessed with Google Page Rank: Today, the relevance of the other sites that link to you is far more important. Read this article for more information on Page Rank

For more information on linking strategies and tactics, read our Linking Overview article.