Increasing the number of links pointing to your site can be difficult. It is an important step in ranking well, because it helps promote the relevance and popularity of your site.

Web Directories, forums and blogs

Submitting your site to directories is a good start. Dmoz.org is used by other sites, such as Google, to display content. Besides the link they also increase chances of receiving traffic.

Other then submitting your site to web directories you can include your site as a signature in forum posts, and blog posts. Make sure to make the site reference an HTML link or the search engines will not crawl the link.

Example of a link:

“<a href=’http://mydomain.com’ title=’Description text’>http://mydomain.com</a>”

Also, make sure to use this technique appropriately. For example, formatting the link in a giant font size can give your site a bad image and may cause the post to be removed.

Link Exchange

Another method of gaining external links is link exchanges. Below are some notes on link exchanges:

What is a link exchange?

A link exchange requires two or more sites to agree to display each other’s links on a link page.

What is important about a link exchange?

Link exchanges are normally done to help with search engine ranking and page rank.

When trying to achieve a higher search engine rank obtaining relevant external links in a link exchange is more valuable then non-relevant links.

How does a link exchange work?

When a search engine scans the sites for content the sites pointing to each other will be noted, and it will give the sites more weight in importance to the keywords the sites contain.

Link values still apply to a link exchange. Exchanging links to a relevant site has more value then exchanging with a site that is irrelevant to the information contained in your site.

In Summary:

• Links can be gained by submitting your site to web directories, forums and blogs
• Posted links should be an HTML link so they can be crawled by search engines
• Posts should be appropriate and not SPAM
• Link exchanges are a mutual agreement to display each other’s links on a page
• Link exchanges are done to increase the number of inbound links a site has
• When doing looking for a link exchange to increase search engine ranking it is best to find relevant links