One of the oldest and best ways to increase your search engine rankings and get visitors to your website is from inbound links. The importance of inbound links to your website will most likely never diminish. It's no secret that search engines, especially Google, value quality inbound links to a website for higher rankings. However, these days the emphasis is not on the quantity of links, instead it is on quality. A couple dozen links to your site from related, high quality, authority sites are much more valuable to a search engine than hundreds of low quality links you obtained by exchanging with anyone that would say yes.


Before I tell you how to get quality inbound links to your website, I feel I should mention something you should definitely NOT do to obtain inbound links. Never participate in an automated link exchange program. These programs are useless. They don't benefit you because you will be automatically exchanging with all sorts of low quality and unrelated sites. The search engines may even penalize your site for links obtained this way. Even manual link exchanges do not carry nearly as much weight as they once did.

However, manual link exchanges are not totally dead so if you do decide to do some "old fashioned" link exchanges, be sure you don't exchange with sites where your link will be placed on a page with hundreds of other links and make sure the page your link is on is linked from their home page. Again it's important to remember you only want to exchange with quality sites related to yours.

Now I will talk about my number one strategy for getting inbound links. And that strategy is... (drum roll please)... To write and submit articles related to your website niche. Be sure to have a resource box at the end of each article. Your resource box should mention a little about your expertise on the subject and have link to your website. If you write good, informative articles then other people will want to repost them on their websites. This will give you an inbound link for the search engines and also a link for human visitors to follow. It's a win/win situation. And for the most part only people who have websites in your niche will repost your articles, so the inbound links you are getting are also relevant. Article marketing is nothing new or revolutionary but it does work and works very well.

Now here are some tips for increasing your inbound links by writing and distributing articles...

* Be sure to write original articles. If you purchase private label rights to articles, rewrite them to make them unique before submitting.

* If you are having a hard time getting started on an article all you have to do is search article directories for other articles on your topic. Find a few that you like and use ideas from them to write a new article in your own words. Remember, you can't just copy another article. That is copyright violation. And it won't be unique anyway so it won't do much for you.

* If you are good at writing with a little humor then you might want to use that skill when writing articles. Humor is very powerful and can attract a lot of readers.

* Once you have a completely original article written, find a few quality websites in your niche and offer them your article for free with your resource box attached. You are not asking for a link exchange, you are simply giving away your informative article for free to selected sites.

* After you have a few good articles on a topic you should compile them into an ebook. Place a short author bio at the end of the ebook with a link to your website and allow other site owners in your niche to give it away free to their visitors. They can give it away as a "thank you" for signing up for their newsletter, as a gift for visiting their site, as a free bonus for purchasing their product or any other way they want to give it away. Once your ebook gets into a few people's hands it will be passed around more and more, thus giving you inbound links and a boost of traffic to your site.

* Submit your articles to a few of the top article directories. When doing this you aren't so much doing it for the inbound link from the directory itself. Of course, that link doesn't hurt but the main reason for submitting to these directories is to get your article in front of other website owners who will republish it on their sites. Two of the top directories to submit your articles to are http://ezinearticles.com and http://goarticles.com

* Publish links to your articles in digg (http://digg.com) and other community based popularity sites. A well "dugg" article can generate thousands of visitors to your website as well as inbound links.

* Network and build good relationships with maybe 10-20 quality site owners in your niche. The higher their site is ranked, the better. Help each other with site promotion, content ideas and article exchanges. Not only will this build relevant and quality inbound links to your website, it will also get you some good friends and JV partners who will prove to be very valuable to your business as time goes on.

Overall there are many benefits of writing and submitting articles. You get inbound links which help with your search engine rankings among other things. Articles also help to establish you as an expert in your niche, bring you targeted traffic and provide you with free advertising. A little time spent each day writing and distributing articles can do incredible things for your website and business.

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Visit his home based business website at http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com and he will personally help you succeed with your own online business.