Solid, relevant links from trusted sites to your site greatly increase your search engine results and your visibility. Search engines often do not list websites without relevant links. This means that you can optimize your website perfectly and still get overlooked by the search engines.
Step #1 Do your research
Find out how many links are coming to your site. Tools like this one at http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm allow you to search by URL and find out how many links you or your competition has. You can use this information to help you know how many links you need to obtain to place your website above theirs in the search engine results.
To find out who is linking to your competition you can visit Yahoo. Once there type link: http://www.yourcompetitorswebsiteurl.com
Yahoo will list the websites that are linking to your competition. You can use this information to find relevant websites that can also link to you.
Step #2 Build incoming links
Here are several ways you can encourage links to your website:
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Add content to your site, webmasters may link to you simply because your site is valuable to their visitors.
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Testimonials and review sites often provide links to your website.
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Online directories. While there are many directories that charge for a listing, there are also several that will list your company’s site for free
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Write articles for other sites. Writing articles is a great method for getting inbound links and most webmasters are happy to give you a link back to your site.
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E-books. Embedding a link in your e-book is a great way to expose people to your site because if you offer an e-book with valuable content, people will distribute it to friends and family and you can distribute your e-book yourself via other sites like other free content.
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Write press releases and submit those releases places. Be sure to include your website link at the end of the press release, and if possible, include it at the beginning too.
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Reciprocal links. Some reciprocal links are good, just don’t go overboard. You’ll want to mix up your linking tactic so it looks natural to Google.
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Beware also of link farms. Many search engines consider link farming a form of spam and have procedures to banish sites that participate in link farming.
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Write a Blog. If you are writing a blog that is hosted on an external blogging network, rather than hosted yourself, any links from your blog back to your site will be seen as valuable by search engines. You can also include links back to each of your web pages and allow your readers to reprint your blog posts as long as they keep the links in place.
There are, of course a ton of tools, information, and resources available on SEO and we’ve only touched on a few of the biggies. You can find free information about SEO and how to drive traffic to your website here: