This is a simple but valuable article for beginners on how to get quality links to your website. There are a lot of sites out there that all tell you that you need to write good content, and then people will naturally link to you. This is probably the most bullcrap thing I hear from people online. Here is why.

Lets say for starters that I write about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I am starting off with no links, and probably will rank nowhere for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Despite my content may be very well written, there are probably not many people that are going to link to me unless I do something so outrageous that my site gets viral traffic from youtube or something else that is way over the top. I’m not saying people won’t link to you, but if you don’t have something extra special, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, nobody is going to link to you (except maybe some scrapers).

What are your options?

So now that we have established that great content doesn’t always get you links, then you have to figure out how you are going to get links. If you are wondering why you need links for those of you new to SEO or internet marketing, good relevant links to your website means better ranking for the keywords you want to be found for in Google.

The first option you have is to build a bunch of sites of your own linking into your main site. This is a strategy that many use, but take a great deal of money up front, and a lot of research to get the right sites set up which link in to the main site. On top of that, is the fact that the sites you build will need to have some strength of their own in order to pass on value to your main website.

The second option involves purchasing links. This is something I have not touched on before. This is also something Google does not like very well. There are a number of reasons I could answer as to why, but I’m not going to go into depth on it. A lot of people I know have been quite successful with this method, rank well in Google for some of the most competitive terms, and make lots of money because they simply don’t have time to build a large network of their own sites, and buy links instead of waiting for a miracle, or networking with other people in hopes of getting free links. This is also probably one of the fastest ways to rank in Google as well.

The third option which I did mention slightly in the last paragraph is social networking. Obviously the more people online you make friends with who also run websites, the better chance you have at getting free links from them. This can be an extremely tedious task, and many simply do not have the time nor patience to wait for this being a viable link solution. Others on the other hand who have been making contacts for years have a large group of friends who will send a link or 2 their way when they need it.

The fourth option, and something you should already be doing is article marketing. This means getting links from article directories online. I am going to say that at one point I promoted unique article wizard, and it worked well, but now I do not use it. I have noticed Google deindexing a lot of sites that post unique article wizard articles on them. However I do recommend using Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Hubpages, and Squidoo. These can be great sources to obtain links by writing articles that are valuable to the reader.

The last tactic some have used to get links is by baiting, but in order to do this you need a blog or content management system that you can update. If you have an ecommerce site, you will find that this can be a very tough thing to do. Link baiting involves writing something about someone else or about a topic which someone else may have already touched on, and then either linking to another persons blog with that source, and writing in such a way that causes them to follow up with another post in which they link to your site or blog. This can be a powerful tactic when executed properly.

You may have other methods for getting links, such as commenting on blogs and others, but the ones I have mentioned are the most common. Getting one way backlinks can be time consuming, but is a necessity for ranking well in Google. If you have any questions on this article feel free to email me and I will do my best to point you in the right direction.