Good links are essential if your site is to rank highly for competitive key phrases. They bring weight and authority, and make the search engines 'think' your site is important and respected enough to rank well.

Good inbound links are necessary for your site to be found by search engine spiders and crawled by them. Sites having more inbound links are crawled deeper, and their content is updated more often. Inbound links from good resources that rank highly for your target phrases give your site a boost, and so do inbound links with your keywords included in the so-called "anchor text", which is the industry name for the text between the and tags.
Link building strategy: plan, verify, rework

For better results, your link building strategy should be planned and thought over thoroughly prior to starting actual work. There are many ways of gaining links to sites, but not all of them are suitable in all cases.

Directory submission is probably the only one that causes no questions and is fine in all cases. Worldwide general directories, local directories, niche-specific directories - there are thousands of them around. Just start - and they will keep you busy until you get tired enough and scream "Stop!" When submitting - strictly manually - do not forget about varying your titles and descriptions - but always include your targeted keywords. Variety is good SEO.

Yet directories are tricky things. Not all of them parse PR (or, in other words, add to your link popularity). Many use JavaScript redirects to link to your site. But don't think it is absolutely useless to submit to these directories. If they are popular enough, they are quite likely to bring direct visitors to your site.

Many directories are paid for. Before you pay for inclusion, do some research. Ask people if the directory in question is worth the money being asked for. Visit good SEO forums (as well as your industry forums). If the directory is known and has visitors, then part with your money. If not, perhaps your money could be better spent.

Other directories require reciprocal links. There is nothing bad in this, unless you do not feel you can link to this site and not be ashamed of the link afterwards. This rule applies in all cases: do not link to any site if you feel shameful of linking to it, no matter what you are offered in exchange.

Reciprocal linking is a popular and effective way of building your link popularity, but it can be dangerous, too. When searching for good link partners, strong ethics and prudence should guide you on your way. Otherwise you are sure to make a mistake sooner or later.

A pure, old-fashioned link farm is easy to detect. It is a huge list of sites - a collection created with the help of one or another automated link harvester, and never sorted or categorised. Link farmers do not care for such things, they have no time for it - they are too busy aggressively harvesting more links. But there are more sophisticated and less obvious ways to increase link popularity artificially - clusters, rings, pyramids, etc. - and all of them are widely practised, while Google and other search engines are looking for ways of detecting and fighting them - with a good degree of success.

So you need to be very cautious. Avoid services that promise to increase your link popularity drastically and swiftly. Rely on yourself - and do everything manually. If possible, do not exchange links with irrelevant sites - it is always better to link to sites that may be of use to your visitors. And ask yourself "Am I making the Net a better place?" whenever you are considering another link exchange.

That will protect you.

Many site owners still think that reciprocal linking and link pages will ruin the business image of their site. We disagree - if everything is done properly, it will not harm your site, and can even improve it greatly - but in this case we do not insist upon link exchange campaigns. There are other ways of link building that can be - and are - employed.

Buying links is another good strategy when your approach is professional. But it is prone to mistakes, too.

Often you may come across sites (or Google Ads) offering PR7, PR8, PR9 links for sale. Beware! Quite likely, the links will be from the pages already full of other links - so the authority passed by each one will be tiny, not worthy the price you pay. There are also sites that have been selling links for so long and with such zeal that Google finally decided to block their PR and authority from being transferred. You won't see it form the site itself, as the PR shown by the toolbar is still the same nice 8/10 or 9/10 value. So, again, plan your strategy with care.

It is much better when you contact the site owner individually - and negotiate your deal, paying thorough attention to all the aspects. Strictly speaking, PR is the last thing you should take into account. Look at the relevancy. Look at quality, ask for visitor statistics - if the site is often visited by people, they may use the link you are buying to go to your site directly.

In any case, if your budget is restricted, you might find this method too expensive. There are other ways that are less expensive but require creativity and effort.

Articles. Writing articles about your industry and publishing them through the Net - or establishing an RSS feed - is a perfect way of improving your overall web presence, including the link popularity issue.

Your articles published on the Net help you build credibility, as they certainly show you know something about your work, not just that you know how to promote yourself. They also contain a link to your site - and bring you visitors and authority.

If you establish an RSS feed on your site - and feed the intros of your fresh articles - then numerous bloggers will sooner or later add your feed to their news aggregators - and post your intros to their blogs, thus advertising you for free. You will have nothing to do - just write articles from time to time and watch your link popularity grow.

Yet for small business sites such information areas may seem inappropriate. In this case launch your industry news site on another domain. Link it to your business site - just do not cross-link them too heavily - and they will transfer link popularity to each other, at the same time improving your business image.

The only obstacle we can see in this case is time or in-house resource restrictions. If you have no time to write articles and can't afford to hire somebody who will do it for you, then consider press releases instead. They are shorter and more business-fixed.

Press releases. These are perfect for your purpose - short, descriptive announcements of your business ventures. Good marketing pitch and strong emphasis on your target audience expectations make them an ideal method of improving your online business positioning. Link popularity is again the side-effect of it.

There are numerous services on the Net that specialise in publishing press releases. The most popular of the is, of course, PR Web - and it has both paid and free option for your consideration. The links from this site are very valuable due to its perfect reputation and popularity with human Net inhabitants.

But to publish good press releases you need a good reason - some business initiative or a special offer. New products or branches are also good - but if you try publishing something insignificant with the sole purpose of adding one more link, be ready to have your release rejected.

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