10 smart ways to get inbound links

1. Post in forums and include a link to your website or one of its pages.

You should choose a forum that is relevant to your website's topic, and that allows its users to post links without the rel=nofollow tag. (This tag tells Google to disregard the link, although in my experience Google follows the link anyway, and in some cases even gives it a lot of weight, boosting the ranking of the target page - see Google PageRank is overrated.) For best results the links should be contextual: that is, they should be a natural part of the text. Write good, substantial, useful posts with a few contextual links to high-ranking websites, including your own. Make sure that the anchor text of each link is totally relevant to the target page; never use "click here" as the anchor text!

2. Syndicate content

Another great way to obtain back-links is to write articles and syndicate them on eZinearticles.com or some other service. Make sure the article contains a link to your website. These websites tend to rank quite highly and they are an excellent source of back-links. Of course users who decide to publish your articles will do so with your link.

3. Let as many people as possible know about your articles

The more people know about your articles, the more likely you are to get unsolicited inbound links. These links can come from a social book-marking website such as del.icio.us, or they can come from private websites.

If you have written genuinely useful articles you can ask online library services, such as lii.org, to link to you. Not all websites are suited to this sort of thing. If you sell shoes, it's going to be extremely difficult to persuade a library or authoritative directory to link to you. Conversely, if your website's business is technical, there is plenty of scope for the creation of the sort of articles that authoritative libraries and directories are willing to link to. Do not approach them before you have produced a least 15 pages of extremely high-quality content. College websites are also great for this. You should contact them before filling your website with ads or anything else that is too commercial, if that is what you are aiming at.

4. Hold an online competition offering a desirable prize.

Word will spread fast and people will start linking to you in the forums and blogs.

5. Network and make friends

It is much easier to gain inbound links if you are on friendly terms with other experts and owners of websites. You'd be surprised at how many links you will accumulate if you make friends with the right people and have genuinely useful content on your website.

6. Online press releases

If something interesting and newsworthy happens with your business you can broadcast a press release using a service such as PRWeb. The idea is to write an extremely interesting and well written press release that has a good link to your website. The press release will be broadcast to all relevant websites, and hopefully as many of them as possible will publish it, your link included. The key is to write the sort of press release that other websites would be interested in broadcasting.

7. Craigslist

Using Craigslist to promote your website is a great way to get back-links. These links won't give you any PageRank but will bring in good traffic and will boost the search engine position of the pages you link to, providing the post and its target page are both well-written. Please don't spam Craigslist - posting once in a while will be enough.

8. Social bookmarking websites

If you write a great article, submitting it to Digg or del.icio.us can get you a lot of traffic. If other readers like it, the article will make it to the front page and you will get many pageviews. If enough people like your article, you are bound to get some back-links. There are several blogs and websites that have attained a permanently high status by creating great content and submitting it to Digg and del.icio.us - you can do it too! Just make sure that your article is original enough to please the masses: run-of-the-mill copy will not cut it with Digg.

9. Trade links with related websites

An oldie but goodie. Trading links with related websites is perfectly acceptable and makes the websites concerned more valuable. Just don't overdo it. It will not make your website a superstar but it's a good way to get started, and it will ensure that search engines spider your website.

10. Produce really valuable content

It's a huge cliche, but it is a cliche for a reason. If your content provides amazing value to its users, sooner or later someone will link to you. It might even snowball from there and start to gain one-way inbound links exponentially - it has happened to several bloggers.