If you want to build long-term link popularity, then it is very important that your site offers good content and special things that provide real value to your visitors. When your visitors see your website and what you have to offer, then the chances are much higher that they will want to create a link to your site.

In the same way, if you have good content, then this will encourage other sites to link to yours.

If your site sell products or services, remember, you aren't the only one. There's millions of other sites on the Web, and thousands of them are doing something similar to what you are doing. You need an advantage over the others.
Creating Linkable Likeable Content will help you get that advantage.

Here are Some Suggestions for Creating Linkable Likeable Content:

Have How-To Articles, especially something relating to your product or services.
Give Reviews of Products or Services in your area of expertise.
Write about something you know. This will help teach something to others without trying to sell them something.
Offer Free Tools or Software downloads from your site.
Create a Helpful Tips Column.
Also check out my page on "Building a Better Website" for more suggestions.

These things will not only encourage others to link to your site, but it will improve the quality of your site. If you do a good job, then other sites will want to link to your site.

8 Ways to Get Quality Links to Your Site

1. Get Listed in the Major Directories:

Directories like Yahoo! or Open Directory Project are a collection of links to Websites, grouped into logical categories such as "Business, News, Government, Entertainment, Health and Reference". The Websites in these categories are reviewed and chosen by real people, rather than a program or Web spider.

The biggest directories have very high PageRank.
Yahoo! and Open Directory are the first two major Directories you should get listed in because they have a lot of influence on search results. If your site is listed in the correct category in these Directories and you have a good description, then the link that points to your site (an inbound link) will be like "Internet Gold". You'll receive a very high PR for being listed. So take some time to determine the correct category your site belongs in.

Yahoo! Directory is the most important and most popular Web Directory. Yahoo! uses people to evaluate whether a site is good enough for the Yahoo! Directory, so getting listed in the Yahoo! Directory is not easy.

To get into Yahoo!, as a minimum, everything on your site must work, it should be up to standards and the site must offer something of value to the Yahoo! Directory users.

To try and get listed, you submit your details to the Directory. Your information will be reviewed and then someone decides whether your site gets listed, and it could take several months before you hear from them.
Open Directory Project is the best free directory to be listed in. It provides directory information to many search engines and sites, such as Lycos, Netscape and Google.

Check out my topic on "Search Engines and Directories" for a listing of others.

2. Establish Links from Niche Directories:

Directories like Yahoo! or Open Directory Project are a collection of links to Websites, grouped into logical categories. These kind of sites would be Topic Specific or Niche Directories. These are websites that provide news and information related to what your site is all about. If you have a website offering home made dresses, then being listed on sites and in directories that focus on women's and girls apparel would be very important.

Use the search engines to locate these sites and then send the webmaster or contact person a personalized email asking them to list your site in their directory. Tell them about your site, what you have to offer, and the benefits that visitors from their site will get from linking to your site. Don't forget to include your Website address.

You could also offer to list their site on your site. This is Link Trading. (Link Trading will be covered in detail in the next section.)

3. Buy Links:

Paying for Links is one way to build more Links to your Web Site. One way to get links right away from a high RP site is to pay for them. Basically, you contact the webmaster of the site and make them an offer, some will already have link purchase plans set up.

This doesn't have to be a long term situation. You can buy a link from a site that has a high PageRank for just a month. This will get you listed in all the major search engines very quickly. In fact, if the site has a PageRank of 6 or above, you'll get listed with the SE's in just a few days.

The easiest and fastest way to buy quality links is to use a Website that sells Links . Here are a few reliable ones:

Text Link Ads - Link Purchasing
LinkAdage - Buy and Sell Links and Link Auctions
Text Link Brokers - Buy Links and Link Management Services

4. Beware of Quick Link Building

The search engines are watchful of websites that add a large number of links in a short period of time and many will penalize you for doing this. So using a web service that offers to sell you a large number of links for a price, might end up having a negative effect on your search engine rankings, even though it is a quick way to build your inbound links

The right way to do this is to have the service gradually add links over time so the search engines won't detect a sudden increase in links to your site. The search engines will see this as an acceptable gradual link building process

5. Beware of Link Farms

A Link Farm is a Website or set of Web pages created solely for the purpose of gaining high search engine rankings by trying to get a large number of incoming links. The site has very little or no content and it consists almost entirely of pages of very long lists of unrelated links that are in no particular order.

These types of pages are penalized by almost all the search engines. Some search engines may even ban the entire site as they consider this tactic to be a kind of spamming.

This is not the kind of Website that you should trade links with.

6. Submit Articles to the Article Directories:

Getting listed with Resource and Information Sites is a way to build Links to your Site. Article Directories are going to be sites that are already indexed by the search engines and to get them to link back to you is simply a process of submitting an article to them that has a link in it pointing back to your Website.

To start, just write one article based on the topic of your website. At the bottom of the article, include a link to your website.
For example: http://www.MyNeatWebsite.com

Next, just visit the popular article directories on the web, and simply submit the article to those directories. Once they've added the article (with the link to your site), the search engines will visit their website, and follow all the links on their site, one of which will be the link back to your site. If you are not already indexed by the search engines, this will do it.

The more article directories you submit to, the more links you'll get back to your website, and the more times that search engines will visit your site. The more links you get, the quicker you'll get indexed by the search engines.

Here's a list of the most popular article directories:

7. Observe Your Competition:
"Study your Competition". It's quite easy to find out who your competitors link to and who links to them.

Visit their sites.
See who they are linking to.
Use the Google link function that I mentioned above in the "Link Popularity" paragraph, to see who links to them.
Contact these sites and ask to trade links with them. I'll talk about how to do this in the next section on Link Trading.

8. Link Trading:
There is another way to get links to your site and it's called Link Trading or Reciprocal Link Building. This is a topic unto itself and is covered in the next section.

In the next topic on Link Trading and Reciprocal Link Building, I'll give you a simple plan you can follow to increase the number of links to your Website by trading links with other Websites.

Link Building for Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Site Worth a Link?

8 Ways to Get Quality Links to Your Site

Link Building for
Search Engine Optimization