Are you inundated with online marketing ads promising first-page placement for ridiculously low monthly fees? Well, chances are if you’ve done enough investigating to find this page, you are not likely to fall for that trick. Those types of services are usually provided by “black hat” SEO companies which will give you a great short-term gain only to be slapped down in the SERPs soon after by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other major search engines because of the shady techniques used to gain those temporary high positions.

Most “black hat” companies are a series of affiliated “link farms” and “junk web directories” that use the marketing power of hundreds of low-quality sites (some with a temporarily high PageRank) to artificially inflate the number of inbound links to the sites they are promoting. These one-way inbound links that establish the receiving site as the authority, act as votes in the eyes of the search engines. The more votes your site receives, the higher in the SERPs you can expect to climb.

But like a corrupt election campaign, anyone creating fake votes from ineligible sources will eventually get punished. The punishment for link schemes can be quick, harsh, and meted out with no notice whatsoever. One day, your business operation can be on the first page, and then the next, be taken out of the search engines altogether permanently. This amounts to blacklisting, and it’s very hard to get reincluded once your site falls out of favor with the search engines. That is because they know you were doing something wrong.

With so much on the line, of course you want to get up there in the search engines, but also do it the right way. The “white hat” way. We know all about safely building your online presence (and position in the engines) by making your site an online authority in your industry. Link building campaigns are not simple, and have a high-cost associated with them, but they are critical to your internet business. If you’d like more information on “white hat” link building solutions, please take us up on our free initial consultation.

The debate on whether SEO content or inbound linking matters more when it comes to getting your site ranked rages on. Bottom line though is that you’re looking at 1A and 1B. No other site factors are even close. So you simply must devote adequate budget to address both in order to climb up the SERP.

There are a lot of online resources on inbound linking, but we haven’t seen any that cover all the different ways to attack getting them in one post. That’s what we’re going to do here. Here are (drum roll, please…) the strategies we’ve found useful in generating helpful inbound links for our sites:

Posting Content To Article Submission Sites

Link Baiting

Negotiating With Webmasters

Pay For Quality Links

Submitting Your Site To Web Directories

Distribute Your RSS Feed

Blast Out An Online Press Release

Triangulating For Inbound Links

Build A High Quality Website And Get Links Naturally

It is no secret that one of the best things that a website owner can do is add good, relevant seo content to their site as often as possible. By consistently updating a site with keyword rich, quality content the chances of ranking high naturally become much more likely.

However, before you start devoting all of your free time and/or money to adding content to your site you better do some research because you need to set some resources aside for an additional strategy. According to many SEO professionals, content is extremely important, but is is NOT king!

Depending on your level of SEO knowledge you probably have a fairly good idea of where this is going. If not, then pay attention because you need to be focusing a majority of your SEO efforts on something besides content. That something is Inbound Linking. Some SEO experts are saying that Inbound Links are more important than content.

Whether you agree or disagree that inbound links are more important than content, you need to be concentrating at least half your time and money on a solid linking strategy. For more information on inbound links click here or feel free to drop a comment or email.

What are inbound links?

Inbound links are links that are directed towards your site from another site. These are the most valuable links that a website can have. They are not configured on the website itself. There are several strategies for generating inbound links.

The easiest way is by uploading content with links to your site onto article submission sites. These sites allow you to upload your content into sections that are relevant to your business. Their feeds are then picked up by other sites, and before you know it, your content is being syndicated over dozens of sites. Most of the time, they keep the linking structure intact. So if your articles contain embedded links to your site, you’ve got an inbound link that the search engines can see! Just make sure that whatever you do, the links are from quality article submission sites.

Another way to generate inbound links that are much harder but worthwhile are establishing rapport with webmasters of sites with high page rank and getting them to agree to upload your content (with embedded links to your site) onto their sites. This can work great with .edu and .org sites, which are, by nature, more non-biased and non-commercial sources. This also means they are probably more likely to help you out than commercial .com or .net sites. Simply start serving them up free content for their site that is well-written and a lot of the time they will gladly accept it. You scratch their website’s back, they’ll scratch yours.

Still another option for generating inbound links to your site is by link baiting. Scour message boards and blogs relevant to your business, and write helpful posts that contain direct reference to resources on your website. For example, if you are a Porche auto parts dealer, it would make sense to visit the exotic car message boards. If you find a post on how someone’s having a really tough time finding a “Porche widget”, then that’s your golden opportunity to pitch in on how a “Porche widget” isn’t THAT hard to find if you know where to look. Even if the perfect setup doesn’t present itself, you can easily join a relevant community and start posting there with your site in your sig file. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone on the forum may like the site and reward you with a link on their site.

The final, cost-prohibitive, and slightly risky/shady way of gaining inbound links is by outright purchasing them. There are tons of link brokers out there who stand in an alley in cyberspace, opening a ratty briefcase full of link positions on pages of various rank. The expensive part comes in where getting a relevant link from a page with a great flow of traffic will cost you a lot. And as soon as you stop paying, the traffic and SEO benefits soon go away. The slightly-against-the-nature-of-the-search-engine’s-TOS aspect of this kicks in when it has become obvious that Google, amongst others, largely frown upon directly paying someone (other than themselves) for ranking and traffic. Eventually their complex algorithms (or a dedicated team with human eyes) will seek out those sites who are brokering links and punish them for the practice. So if you’re really lazy, then why not buy a link? But beware, and also be prepared to sink a ton of cash in the process… not to mention possibly open yourself to having a difficult time figuring out which link brokers are trustworthy and which aren’t.

What is reciprocal linking?

We like to put this question in with inbound linking because it is still valuable to set up reciprocal links on your site. Reciprocal linking is when two websites agree to link to each other. This practice, once a great way to boost natural website rankings on Google and the other search engines, doesn’t work to that effect any longer, but is still valuable in that it helps establish to the search engines what your website is relevant to. Inbound links from relevant websites (without a reciprocal link back to the referring source) have a higher value to the search engines though, because they make it clear which site is the authority to the other. Still, it can’t hurt to reach out to your fellow webmasters and broker a reciprocal if you can’t get an inbound from them.