When you engage in a linking campaign for your web site, you may experience frustration early in the process as you run out of places to get a link. You have to use some creativity, and you have to do a lot of searching, but there are a ton of places where you can place a link, which will help drive traffic from direct click-throughs and from improved search engine rankings.
The most obvious place to start is with directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ. The Yahoo listing will cost a fairly high fee (probably around $300), but may be worth it for the search engine boost, but it is unlikely you’ll get many click-throughs from your directory listing. DMOZ and most other legitimate directories are free. There are hundreds of directories you can submit to. It is debatable how much benefit you will gain from submitting to the many little-trafficed directories, but the Work Media viewpoint has always been that it can’t hurt.
Once you run out of general purpose directories, you need to search for industry-specific directories that relate to your product or service. These may actually be more influential to the success of your linking campaign because of the increased relevance.
Once you’ve submitted to all of the industry-specific directories you can find, you can begin submitting to other types of sites. One method is to place ads on classified sites linking back to your site. While many clasiffied sites are pure junk, some have very high Google pagerank, so they can be a very powerful way to improve your own pagerank.
You can also piggyback off your competition by searching for sites that link to them, and then requesting a link from those same sites. To find those links, do a search in Google for “link:www.website.com” (replacing “website” with your competitor’s web site address).
We will discuss more ways to get links in later articles, but the single most important thing you can do to get links from other sites is to write high quality content that changes often (and then put your site “out there” so people can find it).