On the Internet, search engines are deities you have to appease for them to give you blessings in the form of more site traffic. Now, the Google god and the almighty Yahoo look at many aspects of your site, like the amount of traffic you get or existing penalties. Inbound links, however, have proven to be a particularly effective way to improve your rankings, so you should maximize every opportunity to get them.
Link Directories
Using link directories is a very direct way of getting one-way links for your site. Take note, though, that not all link directories will necessarily be good for your site. It’s a very thin line between link directory and link farm, and search engines have been very much against the latter.
If possible, look for those link directories that have admin-approved submissions and require reviews or descriptions for each link. Measures like those mean that the directory has some sort of quality control, and would thus be good for one-way link building.
Blog Commenting
With Web 2.0 in full swing, blogs are plentiful on the Internet. But it’s not just the owner and the authors who can benefit from blogs. With a little research, you could get links even from blogs that you have absolutely no affiliation with.
Most blogs have a comments section where readers can post their thoughts or reactions to what’s been written. This is a great place to insert links to your site, especially if it’s a very well known blog. Even as part of a comment, that URL still counts as a one-way link to your site, and will still improve your rankings.
Social Bookmarking
Once again, Web 2.0 comes to your rescue with social bookmarking, one of the newer trends in SEO. Essentially, it’s just people sharing interesting sites and links with other people through bookmarked URLs. Imagine the volume of extra traffic you could get if your site was among those bookmarked.
The key to social bookmarking is to make your site look particularly interesting and unique, even to just a niche market. It’s usually those sites that get the most circulation on social bookmarking networks. But you should submit your URLs to the networks in any case. Because they’ll store the URLs in a database or a repository somewhere, that will still count as a one-way link coming from a very popular site.
Article Marketing
The Internet today is all about information. You have to offer one of three things – products, services or information – in order to get noticed on the WWW. But since you’re already offering the first two items, you could use the third one to promote your site.
Article marketing services basically place links to your site inside chunks of text content that’s related to a certain niche. The niche content ensures that you’ll be reaching out to your target market, to some extent. And once your marketing articles get posted on sites and big directories, each of those links will help boost your rankings as well.
While article marketing is touted as the most effective among these four, there’s no rule that says you should limit yourself to just one. Try to use as many of them as possible so that you get to cover all the bases and eventualities.
