by James Woolley, 7/22/2006
Obtaining incoming links to your website fulfils two main objectives. Firstly it increases the traffic you could potentially receive to your site because the more links you have the more traffic you should receive, and secondly, by obtaining links from pages with a good page rank you can increase your own page rank which, although not the deciding factor, will help boost your ranking in the search engines.
Listed below are ten ways in which you can obtain these sought-after links.
1. Exchange Links With Other Websites
This process, known as reciprocal linking, is common place on the internet, and is something most webmasters do. However, while it's something you should do, it's important to note that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way or reciprocal links.
2. Submit Your Website To Directories
This is a good way of getting one-way links to your site (if a reciprocal link is not required). There are numerous directories you can submit to, offering both free and paid submissions. When deciding on whether paid submissions are worth it, you should look at the page where your link is expected to appear and see if it has a reasonable page rank, and the number of other links that appear on that page, with the fewer the better.
3. Build A Network Of Websites And Interlink Them
When building multiple websites it makes sense to interlink them, preferably from a home page link for maximum benefit. This can be very beneficial if each of your websites is on a different server, but be careful if they are hosted on the same server, as the search engines will think you're deliberately manipulating their results, and will most likely prevent you from achieving higher rankings.
4. Write Articles
This is a very powerful method of obtaining a lot of incoming one-way links to your site. By submitting your articles, which include the all important resource box with the link to your site, to multiple article directories you can pick up backlinks from not only these article directories but from other websites who pick up your articles and include them on their website or blog.
5. Write Press Releases
Writing a compelling news-worthy press release about your site or related topic, can also result in multiple websites and news sources picking it up and linking to your site. This is a very effective way of obtaining numerous one-way links very quickly, but doesn't offer the long-term benefits that articles do.