The Importance of Links

All of the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN now use link popularity and link anchor text as the most important factors in determining their rankings.

Submit your site to directories like DMOZ. There are hundreds of directories that will give you decent PageRank and some traffic. I especially recommend it for brand new sites that usually have less success exchanging links (see point 2). Our sister site has numerous list of the best free & paid directories.

Increase the number of external links coming into your site by starting a link exchange program.

Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by your competitors' domain name. Example: link:www.web-directories.ws

Find sites that accept site submissions. Visit your favorite search engine and do a search for: : "add url" "your keywords"

Add content that will attract sites to link to you. This is a harder one, but it will pay off big time in the long run. Think of it as getting free advertising.

Within your web site, ensure that you link your internal web pages to each other. Add a Site Map. Ensure that you have links to your most important pages on every page of your site. This will maximize the PageRank to your important pages.

Paid advertising is another method to gain links. If possible, you should purchase links from sites with a similar these as yours. For example, if you are a travel site then other travel sites would be the most valuable links.

Patience Required

Be patient.

It is believed that there is an aging factor on new links in some search engines and that new links do not provide their full benefit for a number of months. There is also evidence that links from older established sites are more valuable than links from newer sites. To make things even more complicated, search engines, especially Google, give more weight to trusted, authority sites. Government and education sites are a couple of examples.