A colleague emailed me earlier this morning asking me to send him 5 or 6 quick ways of gaining links, as my response grew ever longer and started to take on the characteristics of a blog entry I had the idea of well… turning it into a blog entry.

• Link building (old school) – This requires conducting searches for some of the keyword phrases that you are looking to rank for, take the top 50-100 results of each and systematically run though the sites requesting reciprocal links. Yes it’s time consuming and yes it often goes unrewarded, but yes it’s still a very important part of link building.
• PR releases – Have either yourself or a copywriter on staff to document any new goings on at your company, try to infuse them with as much importance as possible, maybe include an image too, and send them off to any one of the major websites which handle press releases, such as prweb.com. Often you’ll find that smaller websites will take and redistribute your press release getting you priceless exposure.
• Articles – Again, either you or a copywriter on staff can write an article about your industry and submit it for free at websites such as ezinearticles.com, to ensure best results try to write about something that you are knowledgeable in and others will find helpful and make sure to either include a link within the article to your website, as inconspicuously as possible, or to include a link in the author notes at the bottom.
• Guest Blogging – Same idea as above only search out websites in your industry that contain blogs that perhaps could do with some help. Everyone gains in this case, you get yourself a nice link or two and they get new, unique, relevant content to be indexed.
• Directories (paid or otherwise) - I’m not a particular fan of most directories, but I admit they can be useful for link building (note: if you get added to the wrong directory they can also be a hindrance) To find directories that are relevant to your website try simply conducting a google search for “ + directories” more likely than not you’ll come across a few that you can add yourself, or at the very least, exchange links with.
• Social Media – Most social media sites now come equipped with “nofollow” links, however if you look it is still possible to find the odd one or two that aren’t. Add your website url to your signature at forums that you participate in or beneather your name when you are leaving comments responding to other peoples blogs. Yeah I know, this is a type of spam and not something that I really agree with but it is a bonefide tactic used by many reputable SEO’s.

Anyway there’s six quick tips which should help you get started building links for your site, I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few important ones and if I have then feel free to leave them in the comments below and I’ll try to add them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.