Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 7: Getting Links

Getting links to your website is absolutely critical to your success in getting free search engine traffic. There are a number of different ways you can do this, you should use as many ways as possible. They are: other sites link to you naturally because of your content, directory links, links from forum posts, recipricol link exchanges, paid links, article submissions, press releases, and links through social networks.

AVOID things like "link farms" (sites that are basically nothing but a bunch of links tieing many websites together) or linking to sites that have nothing to do with yours. All links should have a value to your visitors. If you are involved with link farms, you risk permanent removal from search engines if they find you out. It just isn’t worth it.

Let’s walk through each of these methods one at a time so that you understand what is involved in each.

For other sites to link to you naturally, you are going to have to have great content, website tools, or some really good reason for other sites to be linking to you. This is going to take some time to accomplish. Keep building your site, adding as much value as you can, and links will come. You may have to ask for these links from other webmasters, to make sure that they know you are out there. You can use SEOelite to find potential good quality sites that will link to you. They may ask for a link back, which is still fine. Generally, one way links to you are more highly regarded than having mutual links, but you want as many links as you can get, from related sites.

A great tool to have to help automate the linking process as much as possible is by joining a program like LinkMetro. Keep in mind you do NOT want to join something that is a "free for all" and fully automated, because then there is no human discretion in what links are accepted and you are suseptible to garbage, spammy-type sites. That is approaching a link farm and should be avoided. Using something like LinkMetro is nice though, because the manual elements of maintaining a link page is automated, but you are still determining yourself who to exchange links with. You can create related categories, find quality sites to link with, and generally get links much more quickly. You can also use SEOelite to find link partners as well. I illustrate that process, and how to use LinkMetro, in the video on this page.

NOTE: Avoid being "over-optimized". You don’t want ALL links that point to a given page to be the exact same. Use a more general phrase for some of the links, and more specific (containing the general phrase) for others. Include a few links also that are different still. If you are over-optimized, you can be penalized by the search engines and lose some of your ranking.

Paying for one way links is also a valid strategy, with a couple caveats. You should again be getting links only from related websites, and you do not want to pay for 10,000 links all at once. Especially in the begin, you need to move slowly in terms of building links. That being said, there are some good sites out there that brokerage buying and selling links. Look at www.linkadage.com for buying links by auction, or www.tradeweblinks.com to buy links at a given price. You’ll get the most benefit once the links age for a few months, so only do this with the intention of keeping the links going month after month, and only do this if it is within your budget. This is also a great strategy to use if you need an extra "push" in the rankings. Ie, you have been building up over a few months and are showing up for a number of important keywords, but only on something like page 5 of the results, so you are there but not seeing much traffic. At that point, buy a couple good links and watch your site potentially shoot up in the rankings.

Being listed in directories is another good way to get links to your site. As mentioned before, you should already be listed in DMOZ.org. You don’t want to have all of your links coming from directories, as that will throw up some red flags in the search engines, but getting a handful more can be a help. Some other directories that you can get listed in are at:

Participating in discussion boards, forums, and blog comments is another good idea to get links. Some of these do not block search engines from following the links (by using the "nofollow" tag as mentioned above), so you can get valuable links this way. NOTE: do NOT spam the board just to get a link to your site. Answer someone’s question in a meaningful way, ask a question you need the answer to, or contribute something to the conversation. This is also a great way to get PEOPLE to visit your site, and posts can stay up for YEARS and bring traffic. Talk about leverage!

As far as the other methods mentioned, article submissions, press releases, and social networks, those methods are so broad that I broke each one down into their own sections. If you follow the methods mentioned in this section, and the ones to follow, and do that consistently over a period of time, you will benefit from targeted traffic for YEARS to come!

Now, on to an extremely powerful method of getting links, and probably the most leveraged form of all: article submission ….