As I mentioned in the last post – building-up a network of good quality inbound links is crucial to having a well ranked website in all the major search engines… but I know from experience that getting people to link to your website is not always as easy as it seems.

Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall put together a great article titled 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006, Randfish from SEOmoz.org also provides some good suggestions in his article – 5 Rare & Valuable Link Building Tactics and if you don’t mind spending a few dollars, SEOmoz.org also has an eBook for sale called The Professional’s Guide to Link Building.

Although the articles above cover different ways to build links, they all have a few things in common:

Writing quality content will make people more interested in linking to you
Write compelling content on your website; Write articles that pertain to your industry and submit them to PR and other news or article-based sites; Create an industry specific blog; Become involved in forums that pertain to your product or service.

All of these things make it easy for people to link to you whilst also making you and your business an authority for your area of expertise.

Directories, “Web 2.0″ sites and local portals
There are a lot of useless directories, business portals and “Web 2.0″ sites out there, so be mindful of this when searching around, but amidst all the rubbish there are still some very good websites that you can submit your site to or gain links from.

Sites like JoeAnt, Best of the Web, Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, Frappr, MySpace, Digg, Del.icio.us and the list goes on and on… Also contact your local chamber of commerce, local council or government sites (if you provide a service to the community) and if there are any prominent business directories (one of the better ones we have around here is OurBrisbane) which can all be goldmines for decent quality links.

Quality – not quantity
The final point I want to make and this is probably the most important – when sourcing links focus on quality – not quantity. Having a few links from government, educational or relevant industry specific sites can make a much bigger impact than hundreds of links from low quality unrelated sites. In a lot of instances having links from such sites can damage your website popularity so avoid these at all possible costs.

If in doubt, always think back to the Google Webmaster Guidelines which state “Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist”. If the answer is ‘NO’ then don’t do it.

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