One of the key SEO factors that influences how well your website ranks in the major search engines is links coming into your website. Not necessarily the number of links that point into your website but the quality; where it is placed and what it is saying about your website. We will cover the anatomy of a good link into your site in a later blog post. In this post I want to give my ideas of how you can acquire good one way links into your website.

Most of these are free to do and simply require time and effort and some patience to acheive.

Write about your business, be passionate

First up, write something about your business, the services you offer, products you sell etc. Then publish them as articles to many of the article directory websites on the internet. Some of these article websites allow you to include links within your actual text which will provide influential links back to your chosen pages. Most of them will allow you to add a brief bio of the author that can also link back keywords to your website. It is very simple to do but time consuming

Submit your website to relevant online directories

Next, if you haven't already make sure you also submit your website to relevant industry and main stream online directories. Not only will this help acquire your desired one way incoming link but directories also provide regular drips of traffic to your website, an aspect that some SEO professionals forget is the main reason for optimising.

TIP ONE: DO NOT USE any of the directory submitting services where your site is submitted to hundreds of non relevant and cheesy directory websites. It will only hurt your website, your brand and ultimately your rankings. Ensure you perform each submission manually and to directories you choose.

TIP TWO: Submit your website to DMOZ.org. Sometimes tricky to get listed but it is free and highly beneficial for your website. Also submit your website into the Yahoo Directory, fee based also but it does provide a good solid link and trickles traffic to your site.

Get active

Being active on blog websites and forums is an excellent way to build links quickly. Ensure your blog is not spam but many blog sites allow you to link to your site with text in your blog. Forums work in a similar fashion allowing the poster to include a few short line of information and website details (ie. link to website) in the user's signature. This method used to be very effective a number of years ago to gain new links fast but over the years the actual benefit in terms of the quality of the link, from forums in particular, is somewhat diluted. However, if you are an active blogger or poster it makes sense to take advantage of this.

Become a blogger for your OWN website

Try to implement a blog for your own website. Technically you won't be able to acquire incoming links from the blgo if it resides on the same domain as your website, but you can always set up a seperate website under a different domain name and serve the blog from there. This way you have full control over all links coming from that website.

TIP: External blogs are excellent for ecommerce sites; use it as a product review website that references your products.

There are many open source blogging software platforms that are breeze to use and install and free. My pick would be using Wordpress or our own blogging software that is installed with our content management system. Both are easy to use and manage... granted that our blog is a paid for service with the CMS !!!

Reciprocal Links

If you are not sure what a reciprocal link is then I will explain. Reciprocal linking used to be the thing to do to acquire links from other websites. A website owner would approach another website owner, preferably in a related industry or similar and ask for that website owner to place a link on their website and vice versa. Usually these links would all be accommodated on one page and called links or similar.

For a time this worked a treat for those businesses employing this tactic. However, like anything this tactic became abused and as a result Google began to view reciprocal linking as a tactic that wasn't natural. The assumption that if each site is linked to each other then there must be some sort of unnatural linking arrangement in place and that equal spam.

Saying this, there is still some value in trading links with relevant sites. The key here is ensure the link is within relevant content on the other website. This way your link is on its own dedicated web page with highly relevant content related to your website.

Syndicate a press release

If you are good with the written word why not issue a press release about your latest products, services, big client contracts etc. Make it interesting and provide as much detail that the prospective reader will enjoy reading. You can email the release to a number of journalists or bloggers. You can also subscribe to any of the onlien PR release websites that will distribute your release for you .. for a fee of course.


Of course, there are many more ways to get those vital 'votes of confidence' aka links into your website. Get creative, there is no rule book to reference. We have used hundreds of other techniques to acquire new links. Network with the businesses you deal with, nearly every business has a website, offer your services for free to charity and ensure they acknowledge your contribution on their website with a link and press release, use RSS feeds from your site that others can pick up and use. Keep you content fresh and interesting and you will find people will link to you naturally without you having to do anything. Challenging - YES!  Rewarding,  when it works and your rankings improve - ABSOLUTELY!

If you would like to discuss how we can help your link building and/ or overall online marketing strategy please feel free to call us (02) 8011 1373. We love search engine marketing.