Search Marketing Consultant

Once you have optimised your web pages to gain top rankings for competitive keywords you will need to do some off page optimisation.  This means building quality incoming links to not only your home page but your inner pages as well.

Find quality web sites that will provide a link to your pages.  It is preferable to have links from relevant pages with your keywords in the anchor text.  Your links should be on pages that do not have too many outbound links and have useful content.  Having a link on a page that has a hundreds other links will have little or now value.  There are many ways to gain incoming links as follows:

1. Reciprocal Linking (Link exchanges).
   Not so long ago this used to be the main way to get incoming links to your website.  You can contact website owners and ask them to link to your site in exchange for a link from your site to theirs.   Some people now try and create three way links, site A links to site B in exchange for site B linking to site C.
2. Directory Submissions
   There are many directories that will list your website with a link.  Many will only link to your home page but some will deep link (link to inner pages) as well.  Some directories will require a reciprocal link but it is preferable not to link back. See ‘reciprocal linking’ above. As well as general directories like DMOZ and Yahoo there are many business directories that will provide links.  The more relevant the directory to your site the better.  There are thousands of directories available on the Internet but many are almost useless as they are low quality or some may remove you link after a certain time or more your link to a page deep inside the directory which may not be crawled by the major search engines.
3. Article Writing and Distribution
   This method of gaining links as become very popular and some article directories such as ezinearticles.com is a very authoritive site and is frequently crawled by the search engines. Some article directories will allow you to add 2 or 3 links inside your article using phrases as anchor text.  Other will allow you to add 2 links in the bio box at the bottom of your article.
4. Press Release Distribution
   This is similar to article writing but the article should be written in a way that it is current and news worthy.  Therefore it can be more difficult to get your press release accepted.
5. Forum Posting
   There are many different types of forums and they all have their own rules. If you deliberately spam forums by added lots of links in posts with no valuable content your account will probably get deleted along with all of your posts.  Some forums do not allow links in posts and other that do allow links may have the NOFOLLOW attribute set.  If you do post in forums make sure you are answering other posts with useful information and only add links if appropriate.
6. Profile Linking
   Many forums will allow you to create an account with links in your profile. But beware, if you simple create a profile with a link in it and do not make any useful posts in the forum your account could get banned.
7. Blog Commenting
   Many blogs allow comments on posts, some you may need to crate an account and some may not.  Most links added to blog comments will be NOFOLLOW. Please only leave appropriate comments or they will get deleted.
8. Guest Blog Posting
   Other blog owners may be looking for extra comment for their sites so may allow others to create posts.  This can be a great way to create bank links to your site providing you don’t abuse it.  There are networks that allow guest postings but these can be of low quality and can be short lived so do your research before joining a network.
9. Social Bookmarking
   There are hundreds of social book marking sites, del.ico.us, digg, redit, stumbleupon to name but a few.  Some will use the NOFOLLOW attribute but good book marks can help with SEO.
10. Social Media (web2.0)
    Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, hubpages, blogger, wordpress etc
    This is a good way to create some valuable backlinks. Create a blog or Sqiudoo page with links back to your website.  Also don’t forget to create a few links to the web 2.0 site
11. SEO Content Writing and Link Baiting
    All of the above methods of link building could be considered as ‘unethical’ by some people. The search engines want to see links built in a natural way and the only truly natural way to build links is to provide quality content and hope other sites link to it.  This can take much longer as even if you have great content people will not link to it unless they can find it.  But writing great content and spreading the word is definitely the preferred method of link building.
12. Submit RSS Feeds to Aggregator Sites
    By submitting your RSS feed to these sites you will get many backlinks.  This works great if you have a blog with an RSS feed. Use sites like feedagg.com and feedage.com

Conclusions
I am not suggesting you use all of the above link building methods but carefully select the ones that suit you and your website.  Be sure to vary the anchor text in each of the links so as to make things look more natural. Also a mixture of DOFOLLOW and NOFOLLOW links makes your efforts seem more natural to the search engines. Take a look at what your competitors are doing.  Look at the websites that have top rankings for your keywords and see what they are doing – and simply do it better.