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The third essential part of your SEO campaign is to gain in-bound links to your site. In other words, you need to get as many *relevant* websites to link to you as possible. Every link to your site is considered a vote, and will raise your search engine rankings. Many theorize that getting in-bound links to your site is the most important thing you can do (aside from having content) for your site’s search engine rankings.

Knowing this, where do you begin?

First of all, many websites are happy to link to other websites if you contact the webmaster or person in charge of links. Most of these websites will be much more likely to link to you if you link to them first. This is key to a successful link building campaign.

Here’s what I do:

First, I find a few webpages that have good information that is supplemental to the info I have on my page. For example, if I am writing an article about laser printers, I might link to another site that is about inkjet printers. I might also find a site that is about printer ink, and another site that is about drum cartridges. I now have three potential sites to link to from my page. If everything goes well, I will then gain three links to my site.

I go ahead and put the links to these sites into my content. I then contact the webmasters, and tell them about the links, and ask if they’d like to link back to me. I have found it very useful to mention the importance of links to a site’s SEO (some webmasters know, others do not) in this link request letter. I also subtly mention that I will remove their link from my site if they do not link to my site. Some webmaster respond quickly and with enthusiasm, some don’t respond at all, some take forever, some respond but refuse to link, others don’t even know how to link. Perserverence is extremely important here.

I wish it were easier, but it simply isn’t. However, the rewards of linking are great. First of all, you’re likely to see a slight bump in traffic almost immediately after being linked to. In addition, if you wait a few weeks, you are likely to see slightly more traffic coming from the search engines. I try to commit to securing 2-3 new links per week. If I persevere, I can be expected to gain over 100 links over the course of a year. Having 100 highly relevant links is very likely to catapult you to the very top of the search engine results pages as well as increase your referral traffic. If you sell stuff or host ads, your revenue is likely growing as well.

Doing this kind of work might take an hour a week, but it is time well spent. In fact, spending an hour of link building is definitely going to affect your site better than spending an hour writing meta tags. Don’t get too caught up in the easy stuff. Focus your energy on positive link building if you are serious about driving traffic to your site!

A few more tips for links:

1. When linking to a site (and having a site link to you), don’t use links pages. These are pages often titled “Links”, and usually contain a long list of sites. For example:

http://www.happywebsite.com

http://www.evenhappierwebsite.com

http://www.thehappiestwebsite.com

or even worse:

A happy website. Click HERE

A happier website. Click HERE

The happiest website. Click HERE

These link pages are not nearly as effective or relevant to the search engines. You don’t get as many “points” this way. You don’t want other sites linking to you this way, either!

2. Include your links within your content.

Example: Laser printers use a system of lasers, static electricity and mirrors to adhere ink to the page, unlike (link)inkjet printers(end link), which use a system of heating small amounts of ink until the pressure generated causes the ink to spray from a nozzle onto the page.

I see so many pages online that do not link in this fashion, and surely their search engine rankings suffer because of it.

3. Use appropriate anchor text. Anchor text refers to the actual text that is attached to the link. In the above example, “inkjet printers” should be the anchor text.

This practice is also rarely done. Most of the time, I will see a line of text such as the one below, but only the “click here” will contain the link.

To find out about inkjet printers, click here.

Not good. When you do this, you’re not saying that the page is about “inkjet printers”, you’re saying the page is about “click here”. This then makes the page you’re linking to less relevant than a page that has the proper anchor text within the link to that page.

When you are out requesting links from other webmasters, be sure they understand the proper way to link out to sites, and make sure they do the same for you.

A great example of a website that knows this, and does it well is Wikipedia. Every link on the site has appropriate anchor text. Wikipedia also has excellent SEO, as it is often returned on the first page of Google results for hundreds of thousands of different searches. Could you imagine that kind of traffic??

4. Don’t link to bad sites, and don’t have them link to you. A link is a link, true. However, a bad link is pretty much useless. If you send one of your site visitors to a useless site, shame on you! You did not help someone who came to you for help. Search engines don’t like that. In addition, if a bad site links to you, the link is unlikely to help you because no one visits bad sites, and links from bad sites don’t carry nearly as much weight on the search engines. It is much more worthwhile to pursue quality links from quality sites that are run by quality webmasters.

Another trick I have on my website is a “webmasters” page. On this page, I include several pieces of information that other webmasters can use as it relates to my site. I have information about my affiliate programs, content that webmasters can use on their own sites (with an embedded link back to my site, of course), and linking info. I have a form that a webmaster can fill out to request a link to their site. This page makes it ridiculously easy for a webmaster to come to my site, and get some info about how I work with other webmasters. It is also a chance for other webmasters to make some money by selling my products on their sites. This also keeps my email address away from spambots.

That about wraps up how links should be implemented on your site.

OK, folks. Let’s review: SEO is one of the best ways to get long-term free traffic to your websites. Effective SEO campaigns are those that SERVE THE NEEDS OF SEARCH ENGINES, AND SEARCH ENGINE VISITORS–NOT YOU. Remember, search engine visitors want information, and search engines want to return the best information to search engine visitors. Your first step is having good information (content) for search engine visitors. Your information has to be relevant to humans, not computers. The information you have on your site should be focused and useful. You need to know your keywords, and not abuse them. You need to get sites to link to you, and you should link out to other good sites. Links are the most important part of an SEO campaign, and it takes time to build these links.

Your next step: If your site is live, start building links. If your site is not quite live, make sure you have implemented all of the meta tags and on-site linking that is necessary.

Alan Bayer is an entrepreneur and internet marketing specialist. He has extensive experience with e-commerce, PPC advertising, SEO, email marketing, and blogging. Alan has launched several websites since 2003, and continues to learn the latest techniques for marketing online, and sharing his knowledge with others.

Alan can be contacted at his website: Alan E Bayer.com

Alan has also recently launched his ebook about SEO: The SEO Cheat Sheet