Organic search engine optimization (or SEO) is a slow and steady process. Achieving top rankings takes time and link building is a big part of the ongoing effort to be on top.

If you want to achieve that status of high search engine rankings you will need quality links and ones relevant to topics, products, or services offered from your web site. The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. More webmasters nowadays seem to focus more on quantity of links but forget that quality is the best objective.

Gaining too many links from directory or "links" style pages can be viewed as trying to manipulate the search engines to "perceive" better rankings for your site. Always check the guidelines for the search engine and perform search queries to find link building topics related to the type you are intending to perform.

Once you're building your link campaign, focus on quality of the links pointing to your web pages. Is the page giving you a link on topic and relevant to your page? What is the position of the link? Is it off to the side with a bunch of other site links or does it appear within a sentence or paragraph? What anchor text did you use, etc?

Submiting to Directories

There are some easier ways to get permanent one way links. Directories can be the best first step to gaining some link value. Directories we use often are: Business.com, dir.yahoo.com, botw.org, sbd.bcentral.com, and several others that are considered top-tier directories. These directories can also be a good source of direct and relevant traffic. The above directories are also human edited, which in many cases convey more trust to search engines.

Look for directories that have a good reputation, .edu or .gov links pointing to them. You can also look at their Alexa ranking or try a couple of keyword queries to see if that particular directory has had search engine troubles before. Please contact us for more on our directory submission service.

Ask for Quality Links

Companies whose products or services you use or market are a good source of links if you can get them. I use a shopping cart software for one web site and offered to write a short review of the product as a testimonial for the company who made it. They featured it on a Page rank 7 page and they get 5k or more uniques visitors per day. If you can get 5, 10, or more of these type of links, then you're moving in the right direction.

Press Releases and Articles

Writing press releases and articles are another good way to get incoming links, although you want to really know what you're doing since it's like only one or two links from one article distributed to 200 locations will count as a backlink.

Write a press release to announce a new service or product or news that your customers or potential customers would find important.

It's no secret that the best way to obtain inbound links to your web site is simply to have a something that is so great, people can't help but to link to it. If this were easy to do, we would all be working for ourselves.

How Unique is it?

Giving useful information to readers is probably the best way to obtain fast and natural organic links. Don’t be afraid to give away some information that has helped you in the past. If it's useful or cool enough, people will link to it.

Many link campaigns that go from 20 links to 10,000 links overnight generally raise flags within Google and Yahoo. Keep your link building steady and from a variety of sources and keep repeating those steps and you'll notice increases in your rankings.