#7: Article Writing & Submission

Article sites like ezinearticles.com are another good place to get back links. You can submit your own articles to these directories, with links at the bottom of the article in what’s called an “author box” or a “bio box”.

Blue Lightning Taser

Not only do you get one back link then and there from the article directory itself, these sites are also places where website owners come to find free content for their own sites. The website owners can take your article from the article site and publish it on their own site, so long as they keep your bio box (and all its links) intact.

What does this mean for you?

It means that by submitting one article to an article directory, you could end up getting hundreds of back links when your article is picked up by other websites.

IMPORTANT: Write quality articles!

It’s important that you write relevant, good-quality articles for these directories. First, the article site moderators might reject your article if it’s poor. Second, other webmasters won’t use your article if it’s bad, so you won’t get many, if any back links. Third, by creating good, unique content, you give your article a chance for ranking highly in the search engines. Yes that’s right…. your article can be picked up by the search engines. You might even find that it outranks your real site!  This is great because people will click through to your site from the article, but only if they’re interested in what you have to say — another reason to write good, interesting articles!

There are hundreds of article sites out there, here are some of my favorites:

* www.goarticles.com
* www.ezinearticles.com
* www.articlecity.com
* www.articlesbase
* www.amazines.com
* www.netterweb.com/articles
* www.articleinsider.com

I strongly recommend that you submit your articles to these article sites manually with a tool like Article Submitter (which also comes with hundreds of article sites pre-loaded, so you just have to plug in your article and go), or pay someone like Submit2Edge to submit them for you.

Much like with directory submissions, automated software might not work very well because many article directories block these tools. (Article Submitter isn’t an automated software… it just streamlines the process!)

#8: Local Link Opportunities

Submitting your site to any relevant local directories can provide valuable links and may help you to rank higher in regional searches.

If you are in the US, you might submit your site to your local Chambers of Commerce, or to the Better Business Bureau.

#9 Link brokers and purchasing links

It is possible to rent links from other websites, but be careful: Google is starting to clamp down on people caught buying links. The red flag is often raised when you rent a link for a period, and then your link disappears when you stop renting it.

I personally prefer to purchase permanent one-way links rather than renting.

You might also try this new angle on link purchasing: Paying a blogger to write about your product or website. This can be a great way to get relevant links. Sites like ReviewMe can arrange these deals for you.

You may come across link brokers at forums.digitalpoint.com, or sites like www.textlinkbrokers.com. Even if brokers don’t explicitly offer permanent one-way links, you can often negotiate something.

#10 Forum & community links

Interacting in public forums and communities can be a great way to get links to your site. Many people engaging in forums and blogs will post links to their website in their footer or profile. So long as you’re contributing to the community in a positive way and not just spamming… these links are usually well tolerated.

Unfortunately these links aren’t the best for improving your search rankings. Many sites implement “nofollow” tags on their links, which effectively blocks the search engine spiders from counting the link as a vote, or passing on PR. (Note that this is true for Google, but other search engines might not pay much attention to “nofollow” tags, so the links might still help your rankings in those search engines.)

The real benefit with forums and communities lies in getting targeted traffic actually clicking through on your links. If you’re a genuine contributor to the community, people will be interested in what else you have to say. You might find that this offers your business a bigger boost than slogging away on your search engine optimization.

#11 Press releases

If you have something very newsworthy going on on your website, then you may wish to consider submitting a press release about it. If it gets picked up by major news organizations like cnn.com, this can be a very powerful source of links and visitors.

#12 Donations to charity

Some charity websites have extremely high PR in Google, and many of them will give you a link from their home page or another high PR page in exchange for a generous donation.

#13 Social media and Web 2.0 links

We’ll look at this strategy in more detail in another post, but in short you can gain a large number of links from sites like www.squidoo.com, simply by setting up your own presence there and linking back to your main site. As with most things, you need to create some good quality content for your Squidoo (or similar) site, but this can be a very powerful tactic since these sites are often highly regarded by the search engines.

#14 Private blog and article networks

I really like this method of gaining high quality relevant links because you have the ability to access sites and links that very few of your competitors will bother with.

There are some good quality blog networks out there: Portal Feeder, for instance, has over 50 blogs in its Blog Network. If you’re a Portal Feeder member you can write a relevant blog post and submit it to the appropriate blog(s) in their network. You can get some really good back links to your site through these posts. It’s a particularly good way of getting deep links to your content.

#15 Blog/article networks that I recommend:

* PLR Pro—A private label article site that also comes with a blog network.
* PortalFeeder—A site packed full of tools to help you gain higher search engine rankings.
* Article Underground—Another private label article site that comes with a great blog network. (I actually don’t use the articles in this site and feel that their blog network is more the value here.)
* Linkvana
* Unique Article Wizard—I’ve only just recently started using this resource and it seems to be producing great benefits.

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