Links links, and more links. Links are a vital part of your website for more than just the obvious reason that the more people link to your website, the more traffic you are bound to get. Links also mean that the big search engines can determine how popular your website is and reward you accordingly by placing you higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Yes the online game is certainly one that is a popularity contest and links are a great indicator of just how well you are fairing in the contest. However, all links are not created equally. You will get much more credit when a website that has a high page rank is linking to you over a couple of different low page ranking websites that are linking to you.

So how do you get the links to start rolling in? Here are some methods to try when you want to make your website fit in with the “popular” crowd:

Submit to Directories: Submit your website to key directories as links from these types of directories will help your ranking. Some link directories are pay and some are free. While you may thing that free is better, in this case it may not be. Look at the actual page rank of the directory before you make that decision. Page ranks of zero and one that are free will do you little good, but page ranks of five and seven that may cost you a buck or two will be beneficial. DMOZ.com is a great freebie and you can go for the big dogs like Yahoo but you will pay for it (Yahoo is $299.00 per year).

Submit to Trade Organizations: Submit your website to specialized directories known as trade organizations. These types of directories are often pay directories but if they are specialized in your industry such as finance or business, then it may be worth your while to give them a few dollars. Be careful of the specialized directories that offer you a free link but ask you to upgrade. These types come and go and usually give no precedence to those who only opt to use the freebie link.

Ask for Reciprocal Links: If you don’t ask you won’t know. Search for other websites within your niche and get in touch with them and ask if they would be interested in exchanging links. This should be done via e-mail and once you start to accumulate some of these and your popularity goes up you will begin to get requests in your inbox on a rather frequent basis. However, don’t jump at every opportunity to link with another website. Only link with websites that compliment your own no matter how high the website may be ranked. The search engines love relevancy and hate irrelevancy. If the search engines don’t like your links, they don’t like you (unpopular) and your page rankings will suffer for it.

Write for Others: If you have a talent for writing then you can use this to your advantage. Not everyone is an eloquent writer and so you may be able to find websites that are in need of some articles to be written in exchange for a link to your website. All you have to do is find high ranking websites within your niche and offer them an article to use for free as long as you can have an anchor text linking at the end of the article with a one or two sentence description about your website. This is a win for a website that needs quality content and a one way link win for you that can end up producing a huge amount of traffic for you.

Use Press Releases: Find newsworthy events within your niche and create a press release about them. Many press release services will allow you to put a link to your website at the end of the press release and this link can end up being in their queue for months at a time. The result will be more traffic and a temporary increase on your popularity. Be sure that you are preparing the press releases in the proper format as many press release services have a different way they like their press releases to be written.

The building of high quality links on your website is a long and often boring task. However, there is no better way to help the popularity of your website and once the popularity is high enough you will begin to see lots of traffic which can translate into lots of sales and finally lots of money. Just as with many things in life, sometimes you have to work hard to reap the benefits and rewards, but once you do you are happy that you did. Link building is no different.

Mb