Link Building 101: How to Get Links to Your Website

High quality sites that link to your website can give it more credibility, increase traffic and improve your search engine optimization efforts. So, how do you get sites to link to you?

Most people contact the sites they want to link with and ask them for a link. If the Webmaster ever gets back to them they will often decline. This is a slow laborious process at best. Although this manual method does work, there are much faster ways to quickly increase the number of sites linking to you.

None of the strategies I'm about to give you should be used to do anything that violates the search engine's TOS or Terms of Service. An easy way to stay in the good graces of all of the search engines without having to memorize their mile long TOS is to create high quality sites that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting and don't do anything deceptive. It's really that simple.

So, the Goal is to get as many "quality" sites linking to you as possible. So, what makes a "quality" site? Google has a rating system called page rank or PR. It is a scale that measures the "quality" of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being that the worst and 10 being the best.

The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites linking to the particular website. So in other words, it's better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR link to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR.

So, that leads us to the million dollar question, what is better quantity or quality? The easy answer is both. You want to monitor the quality of links you are targeting but you don't want to decline a link from someone just because they don't have a PR 10.

The following are some of the fastest ways to build the number of inbound links to your site.

Articles

Webmasters are always hungry for fresh content for their websites and blogs. You can write articles that are related to your website or industry and post them on article directories. The article should contain a small bio about yourself with a link to your site. Webmasters then place your article on their sites and blogs on the condition that they leave your links in place. The best part is that most article directories are free.

Press Releases

There are online press release distribution services that will distribute your press release to thousands of online news outlets. All you have to do is create a press release that contains your important keywords along with links to your site and then submit it.

Once your press release is distributed, many of the sites who receive the release will appear as sites linking to your site.

Blogs

Be sure to include your link in your blog posts when relevant. Ask other bloggers to link to your site and reverence it. If you don't have a blog you can get one. There are many free services.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) & Paid Links

An easy way to get links to your site is to pay for them. You can do this by purchasing a link for a set amount of time (day, week, month, etc.) or you can pay per click.

Link to Yourself

If you have multiple websites or domain names don't forget to link the together. This is assuming that they are real sites and not just a bunch of UGS (Useless Gateway Sites) that you threw together.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs provide Webmasters with codes that they put on their website to track any sales that they refer. When a webmaster puts this code on their website it creates a link to the site they are promoting so as you are building your affiliate business you are also building your inbound links.

The above link building strategies are meant to give you a general overview. With a little well directed effort consistently applied, you will have an impressive number of sites linking to you in a very short time.