Without attracting traffic to your web site you won’t make many sales or get many subscribers. To generate traffic you first need to optimize your web site then build lots of incoming links to it.

Top 7 ways to build incoming links with articles

1. Write good content

Good content means unique content that benefits the reader. You shouldn’t just scrape content from someone else’s web site or blog and claim it as your own. That is copyright infringement. Find your own unique style of writing and offer valuable information your readers can act upon. Good content builds links because people will naturally spread it around the net. It may be published to a web site, ezine or bookmarked on social media sites thus generating lots of links.

2. Submit to article directories

The top article directories receive millions of visitors every month. Include links in the resource box at the end

of your article. By submitting your article to these high traffic directories, visitors will find your web site through the links in the resource box.

3. Submit to web sites and blogs

Add your article to your own web site or blog. If you’ve already submitted it to an article directory modify it a little by changing the title and a few paragraphs. Through these small modifications you create another unique article that garners traffic and the search engines will rank it accordingly. It avoids being recognized as duplicate content.

4. Submit to ezine and newsletter publishers

Create a list of publishers that wish to receive your articles for publication. Check their rules as some require a certain number of words. Instead of just submitting to directories and hoping ezine publishers find your article, go straight to the source. You will gain more traffic as more articles get published.

5. Submit to social media sites

Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc receive millions of visitors. If you get links from these sites by adding content to them it will boost your web traffic.

Example

EzineArticles has a feature that automatically submits your article to your twitter account every time you submit an article to it. This is one way to easily incorporate social media into your marketing mix.

6. Write guest articles

Find high traffic web sites or blogs in your niche then offer exclusive rights to one of your unique articles as long as your resource box remains intact. Links from high traffic sites carry much more weight than submitting your article to many low traffic web sites.

7. Repurpose your articles

YouTube gets more traffic than Google. Repurpose your article into a video article and submit it to YouTube and other popular video sharing sites. Some video sharing sites allow a link to be included in the description.

Create podcasts of your articles and submit it to podcast sharing websites such as iTunes. Because these video and audio sharing web sites attract millions of visitors, links from these sites can dramatically boost your link popularity and traffic.

Learn how to attract a continuous stream of NEW visitors to your website by picking up a copy of Strategies for Effective Article Marketing.

Herman Drost is the CEO of http://www.iSiteBuild.com Web Design, Hosting, SEO.

No link building campaign can be deemed as complete without the use of Squidoo Lens and HubPages Hubs. While there are lots of traditional approaches of building backlinks to your site, Squidoo and HubPages are top of the class social media sites that offer high quality contextual link building opportunity.

If you have been building backlinks for your site for some time, then you know that typical methods like directory submission, social bookmarking, blog commenting, link exchange, etc. are not helping you secure the top search engine spot you are targeting. While these methods still work to some extent and do get your SERP (search engine result pages) ranking up, they are just not enough for top ranking within a competitive niche.

Out of many social media sites these days, Squidoo and HubPages proved to offer the kind of contextual backlinks that Google seem to like a lot these days. Basically what you do to use these two social sites for your link building purpose is to join the sites for free and publish uniquely written articles covering the topics of your own site. Once you publish the articles with Squidoo and HubPages, you then need to promote those pages as well for search engine indexing. Within the articles, you can use the keywords as anchor texts to link back to your own site.

On Squidoo, each page built is called a lens. Once you sign up for a free account and login to your account, you will see your dashboard which you can navigate through to do what ever you want to do within Squidoo. If you are to build a lens for the first time, then you can just click on the link where it says “make a new lens” on the top left corner of your dashboard. One important piece information you need to know is that, you need to build a lens with at least 3 modules (basically 3 paragraphs under 3 different headers) for Squidoo to view your lens as complete and allow you to publish it. It is ideal that you write your article in an SEO friendly fashion dividing the article by multiple paragraphs before you start building your lens. Once the article is written, you can just copy each paragraph under one separate module. You also have the option to add images on your lens which will make the lens look lot more attractive.

Link building with Squidoo is easier than HubPages because Squidoo lenses offer you dofollow links to begin with where HubPages external links are nofollow to begin with. There is a way which allows you to get the external links to turn to dofollow however.

HubPages is pretty much same as Squidoo as it also offers you the opportunity to publish your article for backlinks. Pages and paragraphs on HubPages are called hubs and capsules compared to lenses and modules of Squidoo.

While link building with HubPages offers the same great benefit as Squidoo lenses, there is a little bit of extra work involved to make the hubs dofollow. Each hub account has a personal hub score which needs to be 75+ for the hubs under that hub account to be dofollow. It is not very hard to achieve 75+ personal hub score and all you have to do is to promote your hub to get some traffic and backlinks. More traffic and backlinks you will have, higher your individual hub score will be. Keep in mind to login to your hub account and edit your hubs once in a while which will also help.

There are many other social media sites which you can use for link building purposes but HubPages and Squidoo are two sites that are being utilized most by advanced level SEO experts. There is no limit as to how many lenses or hubs you can build so you can just build one page after another one and use these 2 sites for unlimited backlink source.

A web blog is a type of website maintained by individuals or organizations with the aim of getting regular comments from the readers. It may include graphics or videos. They provide commentary or news on particular topics while others function as personal web diaries. Link building involves posting a URL (Universal Resource Locator) path in a blog or web page so that readers can follow the path and get certain details on a particular topic. It involves negotiating with web or blog owners in order for them to allow you to build a link in their web pages or blogs. In some instances, some websites offer link building for free and even direct traffic from the blogs to the links.

One of the ways to using a blog as a link building tool is to ask the visitors politely to link or embed your blog to their blogs or websites. Often, the viewers will do so as long as the information provide there is relevant, unique and information that not many others do not offer.

Another easy way to build links in blogs is to participate in theme oriented forums. These forums involve sending reactions to a certain theme started by the owner or just anyone in the blog. Several web pages and blogs provide room for forums, where people can comment and share on certain topic issues provided by the author or an independent person in the blog.

Blog pages like Yahoo Best Answers, Facebook groups and Google groups provide answers to questions on several topics. Users ask questions and others with the knowledge/answers try to give the best answers to the questions asked. In this case, people build links or provide URL paths that tend to answer the questions in mind. Others write articles on topical themes and invite comments for them.

Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and squidoo provide users with the ability to create pages in them and therefore one can create a link back to your blog or website. Further, web feed formats such as RSS (Really Simple Syndicate) can be very important link building tool. Here, publishers syndicate the regularly updated RSS which in many instances include news headlines, audio, videos and general texts posted in a standardized format and this is called a feed. Subsequently, subscribers benefit by reading aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. Here, one can build a link to certain information that is related to the theme.

Video blogs like YouTube allows people to set up videos and further allow users to embed the videos on their blogs or websites. More often than not, people build a viewing audience rather than anchoring text passing links. These videos can include visual texts and moving objects which may have links to some other websites or blogs. Here, audio files can also be set up for listeners. Some of these video blogs provide forums and commentary areas. Users can go ahead and post links by embedding URL texts and articles on the commentary area. Therefore, for optimal link building, blogs offer the best in this regard.

Lastly another option to use blogs as a link building tool is to hire a service that specializes in posting your article to a number of blogs or a network of blogs, by doing this you save the headache of searching throughout the net for blogs and you do not have to worry if your article will be accepted or not because the acceptance rate for these services are normally 100%.

Link building is a tricky affair that requires a certain amount of effort and professional guidance. For designing and implementing a successful link building strategy one needs to have a clear understanding of the latest trends in the online marketing and good experience.

Usually for the success of any online business a well-structured and well-maintained link building strategy needs to be employed. Every For a website’s outstanding performance it is essential to adopt better link building techniques, be it one way link building or reciprocal link building techniques, and attract traffic to the site. Further, inbound links help in generating traffic and getting better search engine rankings. By getting connected to other relevant websites, you can divert enough traffic to your site and also get easily noticed by the search engine crawlers.

Link building is indispensable for the success of any online business. Its benefits are manifold. Here are some of the proven techniques of link building by adopting which you can expect better results:

1. Original Content: Content is the life blood of any website. Quality content can attract visitors and that is what any online business should look for. You can publish latest news, humor, and controversial topics or even some informative content in your website, but you should ensure its quality and readability. Moreover content should be original. Duplicate content gives bad impression to the readers.

If you have original and interesting content it will pull readers as well as inspire other websites to establish links to your site.

2. Publish Articles: Article submission is a great way to establish links to your site. You can write articles and then submit them in popular article directories. If you publish quality articles it is likely that visitor get attracted to your site. Further, most article directories allow reprint of articles where the owners of various sites can pick up your article and publish them. But while doing so they have to quote the source also.

By submitting articles in high ranking directories, you can attract a great number of visitors. This technique also helps in establishing inbound links. Since these articles are often reprinted, keeping the resource box intact, your site gets linked to other sites automatically.

3. Establish links with your friends’ sites: You must be well aware of the websites of your friends and associates. You can link their websites to your site and also link your site to theirs in return.

Establishing links with the websites of friends and asking them to link to your site in return is mutually benefiting. Your site helps in popularizing his and his site advertises yours.

4. Directory submission: The World Wide Web abounds in large number of directories. By submitting your website in some of the popular but relevant directories, you can get easily noticed by search engines and visitors.

Most online visitors go to the directories which categorically houses various websites. By submitting to these directories, your website can get a lot of visitors. In a way it gets better links.

5. Circulate Press releases: Publish press releases and circulate them through popular sites. By doing so, you can attract the attention of the viewers, create awareness about your business and enhance your business.

Press releases are latest updates about a product launch or service or the advancements of business. By circulating them website owners can attract visitors and also benefit from the links created through Press release syndication.

6. Tag articles in socializing sites: Social media marketing is also a very effective link building technique. You can visit various social sites, such as delicious, Digg, Technorati etc., and read the content there for new ideas. Moreover, by tagging these articles you can draw the attention of other visitors or the writer also, thereby inducing them to visit your site.

By tagging the content in social sites you can attract a large number of visitors, because these places have the highest number of visitors. By doing so, you can establish links to your site.

7. Research for relevant sites: Research and find out similar sites that has a very good page ranking. You can analyze their content and approach for links. By approaching them you have already made aware of your presence. It is likely that they may reply in return and help you to link to their sites.

Pages with higher search engine rankings already has large group of visitors. By linking to these sites you can generate traffic to your site and expect better rankings.

8. Write and comment on blogs: Blogs are usually noticed by search engines because they are frequently updated. If you start a blog and post fresh content there, you can get more and more visitors, because users are more attracted to personalized writing and frequently updated content. As the number of visitors increases, it helps you to boost your search rankings. Also blogs are interactive because there is provision of users leaving comment on it.
Moreover by commenting on other blogs sites that publishes current news, latest updates etc., you automatically get linked to a lot of sites.

A blog complements your site. You can attract visitors by fresh and interesting content. Also by commenting on other blogs you can establish links to your site.

Now you are aware of some of the best techniques for link building. By sincerely focusing on link building you can expect to build a strong foundation of your online and climb the ladder of success. However, the necessity of professional guidance for link building cannot be ignored all together.

If you think about the many keywords you use in the marketing of your online business ideas, you get an idea about how multidimensional task is the link building. And it is not a quick process, but needs thinking. Here are some requirements.

1. You Have To Know The Various Benefits You Are Marketing.

Let me take one example. My site is selling online business ideas from a wide area – affiliate programs, data entry jobs, hosting, AdSense ad information, Kindle readers etc, etc. Depending on the keyword I am using, the message is slightly or totally different. When I send an email to some authority site and ask a link back to my site, I have to present an advantage to the webmaster.

Why would he allow me to get a link? Well, the only answer is, that he thinks to benefit from that. And that opinion depends totally on the way, how I can persuade him. If the site has a high PR, the webmaster gets linking proposals a lot, so I have to be able to stand out from the crowd with a taylor made message.

2. The Question Is About The Creative Link Marketing.

Like in all marketing of the online business ideas, so also in link marketing, you have to be creative. And that is worth it, because one PR 8 link is valuable. The question is about link marketing, which means that this unique activity needs its own marketing plan. To be creative you need personal tools, content, widgets or even cartoons.

3. The Repetition Works Also Here.

The repetition is the mother of all effective communications. When you want to market your online business ideas powerfully, you have to get links. It is not wise to ask a link with only one email, but to build a multistep campaign, where you first send some emails, which do not ask anything, they just build up awareness and trust.

Only the last email includes a polite question, if they would like to place your link on their site. You offer a ready made hyperlink with the anchor text, to make it easy. All material must be of a high quality.

4. The More Taylor Made Your Messages Are, The Better Response You Get.

The webmasters want to hear, how their sites can benefit from yours. Now, to be able to do this, you have to do your home work. Do not send the same message to everyone presenting your site benefits. Write every email case by case and in the way, that the respondent sees, that you know the key points from their site. And tell them, what they get from your link.

So to build links from high PR sites to your online business ideas site, you must plan this activity as a separate campaign. And why not. When I follow my site traffic from Google Analytics, I can see, how well the best keywords bring targeted traffic. And all links from authority sites raise the ranking of my site on the keyword result page, which you have used as an anchor text.

It has long been known that link building is a vital part of optimising your website. The search engines have worked hard on adapting their ranking algorithms, the process by which they assess where a site should rank, in order to reward quality of links over quantity.

This would lead you to the assumption that the more links a site has from relevant and quality sources the better. Furthermore, links using the targeted key phrase of that page as the link text are more powerful than generic link text such as ‘click here’. With this in mind, how do you go about getting the links you need?

One of the ways that websites are getting links to their site is by distributing content that can be picked up by other webmasters. This can be in the form of article marketing, press release submission and blogging. This article will help you maximise your efforts with tips on designing a content distribution link building strategy:

Target Audience

It is important to consider who the people that you want to target are. Creating content that is right for your target audience will be the key to how many webmasters are willing to republish it on their site.

Research

Research the subject matter you are writing about. Visit forums, blogs and search for questions online using keyword tools such as Wordtracker Labs and Google’s own keyword tool. Find out what people in your target market really want to know about.

Purpose

Does the content meet the needs of the target audience? Is it informative and help the reader with the solution to their problem? A well crafted and considered piece of content can be valuable in terms of its ability to generate links.

Innovative

Are you simply rewording something that others have created or are you generating your own unique take on the subject? Websites are often looking for new ideas and in a crowded internet you need to stand out above the rest.

Check your Work

It almost goes without saying but any content you distribute will reflect upon the organisation you are looking to promote. Make sure it is spell checked, proof read by someone else and checked for errors.

Optimise

Make sure the content you wish to distribute has the keywords of the subject you are promoting in the appropriate places such as article or blog titles and in the content and any Meta if it is allowed. Some content can be indexed and ranked in its own right such as your blog post and can be easier to find by those seeking content for their site or for their own interest.

Link

The most important thing to remember is to link back to your own site using the appropriate key phrase as anchor text. In any article this can be done in an author’s resource box and within the content of the page. It is best to do this at the point the reader is interested in finding out more.

Submit

Once you are happy with your piece you can submit it to some article submission sites so it can be picked up by web content managers and webmasters. Sites such as EzineArticles, Article Base and Isnare are good examples, and  in the case of Blogs there are blog directories that you can submit your blog to including Blog Catalog and Blog Pulse.

Promote your Material

A mistake often made is that once people create some content, they forget to promote it. This can be done by using social media channels such as Twitter or using your network on sites such as Facebook. Your material could easily be passed around and end up generating traffic and links back to your site. You can also email your distribution list letting them know you have just created a blog post that would really help them.

In conclusion building links by distributing content is so much more than just firing off waves of articles and blog posts.  A carefully thought out and crafted article could be very powerful in gaining both links and relevant traffic back to your site. So get writing and with a bit of practice you could gain those much needed links; leading to a boost in rankings and, ultimately, site traffic.

By now, anyone who has dabbled in internet marketing or SEO for their website knows the best way to rank in the search engines is to link build for the keywords they wish to target. While the search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, most experts agree that link building is one of the biggest. However, not all link building techniques are created equal.

As any true link building expert can tell you, there is a big difference between amateur and quality link building. True experts know that any link building campaign should be a balance of several different techniques which can include targeting less authoritative links through article marketing and forum participation as well as going after the big links, which typically include contextual and one way link building from high authority sites.

The goal of the search engines is relevant results – the number one result for a search should be a website that has the best chance of fulfilling the need of the searcher. If the search engines had their way, nobody would be actively seeking links – it would happen naturally based on relevance, usefulness and popularity of a site. Luckily, that’s not the case.

Thanks to search engine optimization, we now know that we can engage in certain link building services and activities and actively help our sites to rank for our popular keyword phrases. Since the search engines call for ethical link building, the most powerful form of building links tends to be one way contextual links on relevant, high authority sites for keyword phrases you’re targeting. Not only are they powerful links, but they look more natural to the search engines.

Contextual link building is one of the toughest, most time intensive link building techniques you can engage in – but the results are worth it.  Not only do the links help your rankings, but you should also receive traffic from people clicking on those links. Getting contextual links is about finding sites that use your target keywords in their content, and persuading them to link to your site using those keywords as anchor text. To the search engines, this looks like an authority site is actually recommending you as a resource for that keyword topic – the more of these you can get, the faster you’ll climb in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Here are a few SEO link building tips on how to find highly relevant and trusted sites to request contextual or one way links from:

1. Search your target keyword on Google and look at the top 100 sites. You want to get as many links from these sites as possible. To find the page on a site that is most relevant to your keyword, search Google with “site:domain.com keyword”.
2. Use a tool like Hub Finder (from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook) or similar software to run an analysis of these top 100 sites and find additional sites that link back to two or more of your top 100 – then get links from as many of these sites as well, preferably right within content.
3. If you can’t get links from some of the top 100 (and it’s tough, since many will be your competitors) examine their backlinks and try and get links from those sites. You can utilize Yahoo’s “link:domain.com” search for this. Use the Google search mentioned above to find the page on the site that is most relevant to your keyword.

These three tips are some of the most powerful tactics you can employ when  increasing links to your site. By mixing these highly relevant and authoritative links with lower level links from article marketing, blog writing and forum/blog participation, you can create a long term link building campaign that is sure to boost your rankings.

Keep in mind that building links is a long term process – rankings don’t happen overnight (in most cases). But by engaging in ethical and quality link building, you will eventually see your site ranking for the keywords you’ve targeted. In the end, until the search engines drastically change their ranking methods, the site with the most links (and most POWERFUL links) will win the rankings race.

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. A web site’s link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site.

Link Popularity history

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In the past a web page’s ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of keyword occurences within ‘on-page’ elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag.

When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using ‘on-page’ elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. ‘off-page’ elements. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example of which was through the use of link farms, pages the contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of links was being abused so the search engines made use of the old saying “quality not quantity” and began to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality links were looked upon favourably by the search engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is still the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a search engine optimizer.

Main classes of links

Note: In the following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB is an outside site (i.e. a web site under a different domain name than SiteA).

Inbound links:

Inbound links to a web site are links that originate from an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA.

SiteA (—– SiteB

Outbound links:

Outbound links from a web site are links pointing to a page on an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteA pointing out to a page on SiteB.

SiteA —–) SiteB

There are two further classifications of links:

Reciprocal links:

An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, the link is reciprocated by both parties.

SiteA —–) SiteB

AND

SiteA (—– SiteB

To achieve a high link popularity the type of links to build are inbound one-way links. This simulates how natural links are created i.e. links that people create to point to your site because they found it worth linking to.

For outbound links it is natural to assume that they might decrease link popularity of a web site but this is not true. You do not give away your link popularity when you link to another site. They do not add to your link popularity though.

Reciprocal links can add to your link popularity if the web site that you exchange links with has a higher link popularity than your site. However they are not as powerful as inbound, one-way links as they are quite artificial in nature i.e. most probably created by communication between the owners of both sites.

How to build link popularity

So it is quite obvious that to help build up a nice link popularity many inbound, one-way links need to be created. This can be achieved in a number of different (and most importantly, legal) ways:

Directories:

Directories are categorized listings of links from around the web. Many, many directories exist and vary in their methods of getting your link posted on them. They provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories.

Great site content:

The most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have great site content that other web sites will want to link to. This allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. The best thing about this is that it requires no communication on your part, it just happens naturally. If your site has poor content then others sites may not link, including the directories. Most of the top ranking web sites today got to the top because of great content. Writing interesting and informative articles for your web site is a good way of getting these kind of links.

Emailing web site owners:

If you come across a listing of links on a web site other than a directory e.g. a links page on a somebody’s personal web site, it can do no harm to write the web site owner a polite email requesting a link to your site from their page. They may request a reciprocal link in return but sometimes they do not and you can get a quality inbound, one-way link for your efforts. I have got many links in the past using this method. In my email I always ask them to visit my site first before making a decision to link and I personalise each email with a comment or two about their site.

Summary

The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site’s link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. Other ways to get these links are having great content on your site and requesting a link to your site from other web sites.

Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process but is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic.

Link building is extremely important for your website’s success and will have an immense effect on your overall search engine rankings. Follow these effective link building strategies for beginners and you will be well on the way to link building success.

Article writing – Article writing is regarded as an one of the most effective link building strategies for beginners and professionals and a good way to score free links; through the use of article syndication, it will help to increase your focused site traffic and SEO rankings. Focus your attention on writing something related to your business and make sure you submit it to a well-known article site for example Ezine Articles, Go Articles or iSnare.

Link directories – Numerous link building campaigns build their sites success with submissions to specially developed link directories, as a way of ensuring full exposure of their companies website.

Social bookmarking – Social bookmarking provides visitors with the opportunity to leave comments and remarks on other sites they’ve visited, which is a great way to get first hand exposure. These social sites include Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. If you can get noticed on a social bookmarking site, this will undoubtedly result in traffic avalanches to your website.

Vary the anchor text during link building – It is undoubtedly extremely important to vary your anchor text during link building. Nothing has the ability to trip a search engine filter quicker and get you penalized, than building every link to you site with precisely the same link text and format, it’s also imperative to make sure a range of relevant keywords are used.

Build links at an even rate – Tons and tons of articles on safe link building can be found on the internet, but rather than being obsessed over numbers your focus should be the evenness of the amount you create each month. Search engine filters will be tripped if 200 links are built one month and only a couple the next and this may result in your site been penalized.

Concentrate on content- Concentrate and focus all your efforts on developing above average quality content which will result in your site becoming linkable, aka link baiting. Link baiting is regarded as the best way to greatly increase inbound links to your site or blog. Think it over now – why would a site owner want to link their sites name with a website containing a load of junky content? Should your website however be filled with quality, interesting and informative info, link creation will follow as an inevitable consequence.

Add a blog to your website – The role of a blog related to your business website is one which is often overlooked. Does your site currently have a blog? Blogs have the potential to generate enormous amounts of site traffic. I would recommend that you create one immediately. Blogs are ideal for industry related content building.

Spend 15 percent of your time on link building – At least 15 percent of your time should be spent on link building and if that’s not possible it may be best to hire a professional to do it on your behalf.