Inbound Linking Tips And Tools

Inbound Linking Strategies
Getting other websites to link to yours is one of the most time-consuming and essential tasks that any Internet marketer must face. Linking campaigns can be boring, repetitive, and, if done correctly, incredibly successful!

Within the Internet marketing world we call these links to our websites "Inbound Links", and they are important to your website for two reasons:

1. Inbound links bring traffic - whenever a website has a link to yours, a certain percentage of their traffic will visit your website. The amount of traffic each link generates is usually quite small, but as you build more and more links, the number of visitors can become significant.
2. Inbound links increase search engine awareness - the more links the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) see pointing to your site on the Internet, the more important they assume your website is. A website that has 10,000 inbound links will typically be ranked higher for it's keywords than a site with only 20 inbound links.

There are many ways to get inbound links. Some cost money, and some are more effective than others. Following are 4 sure-fire methods of getting zero-cost inbound links. Implementing these will certainly help to improve traffic to your website.

Submit to Website Directories

Whenever I launch a new website, the first thing I do is register it on the web directories. Now, there are thousands of directories on the Internet, but only about 250 actually get traffic and count from a search engine optimization standpoint. Compiling the list was a painstaking process, but now that we have it, we're able to really boost a new website into Google's index pretty quickly.

You can submit your website to the free web directories, or you can have a service do it for you for. I will tell you that it is a boring and repetitive process to do yourself, and can take several days to a week to do 250 submissions.

Some web directories will offer enhanced listings for a small fee (usually under $20). These enhancements can be worth the money if you feel pretty sure your website will get valuable exposure or additional ad space included in the deal.

Submit Content to Article Directories

If you publish an online newsletter, then a really great way to get more exposure for your website is to submit your articles to online article directories. This process can be monotonous, but well worth the effort. Over time, I have compiled a list of about 100 article directories that do a good job of providing SEO-friendly links and decent turn-around time on their review cycles.

When you write an article for the article directories, you want to make sure that it is informative and newsworthy. Sales pitches are usually discarded before they are published, so make sure your content is valuable to a website publisher before you take the time to submit it.

RSS Feeds and Blogs

In addition to submitting your articles to article directories, why not create an RSS feed out of it as well? In addition to article syndication, Blogs are another form of content syndication that uses essentially the same format for distributing your content on other websites.

Once your feed is listed on the distribution sites, they will rescan your feed every few days and update the information in their databases. The beauty of RSS is that you don't have to resubmit every time you add a new article.