by: Jack Humphrey

There are several different ways to build links for traffic and for search engine rankings. Matt Cutts describes the best links as links which are given freely by authoritative sources that are trusted by visitors and Google themselves. (to paraphrase)

So the following tactics will get you those kinds of links:

1. Linkbaiting ' writing controversial, wise, witty, valuable, or otherwise good content that gets other people talking about you on their sites, linking back to your post.

2. Press Releases ' This may seem counter-intuitive since most people think press release syndication is only about "placing" links where you want them across a large network. But think of it this way: PRWeb.com has a trackback feature where bloggers can do a trackback to your release and get a valuable link back to their site in the process. They talk up your release and your release gets more traffic, link popularity, which sends you more traffic from the release including more link popularity by having a release that actually ranks.

Link Buying

Text Link Brokers and Text Link Ads (both .com) are the best places to buy advertising. I say advertising because you shouldn't be buying links just for pagerank. I get more traffic than you do and my pagerank sucks. Plus if Google finds out you are buying links solely to manipulate their rankings, they will zap you.

(I know this is stupid. How can Google know the difference between you buying a link on a site for traffic and buying it to manipulate their link popularity algorithm? It's a ridiculous argument to say they know why I bought a link. Google doesn't know your reasoning for buying advertising other than you want more exposure. Keep it that way by not talking about "buying links" and instead call it advertising. That's really what it is.)

Don't buy links for pagerank. Here's another reason:

You should be buying ads for traffic directly from the site you are buying from. Search engine rankings are a side effect of good advertising, not the reason for it.

Authoritative Directories

There are directories you must be listed in if you are serious about your online business. And they cost money. Sorry, but you can play the "free" game for years before you see any serious traffic from free link building alone.

You can gain a lot by submitting to Yahoo Directory, Best of the Web, What You Seek and other human edited paid directories. Google trusts the sites they find there and so do the visitors who use these directories to search.

You can circumvent any paid linking and advertising and still succeed. But I'm willing to bet you don't want to wait as long as it is going to take to get the results you are looking for by going to totally free link building route.

by: Steve Szasz

Social Bookmarking web sites like http://Del.icio.us" title="http://Del.icio.us" target="_blank"http://Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble Upon and Furl allow their users to create a set of web site content bookmarks. Submitted book marks are organized by content tags, which are arbitrary phrases or words a user can assign to the content they wish to bookmark. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize web site content using tags.

The most popular Social Bookmarking web site is Digg. Digg is a relatively new social bookmarking web site and has in it’s short time attracted millions of members who daily add bookmarks to all sorts of web site content. Over search engines and other bots, social bookmarking web sites have an intrinsic advantage. Users will choose what content they will bookmark, unlike relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.

Users of a social bookmarking web site will read other posters bookmarks and then add them to their own bookmarks if they liked them.. You can even view RSS feeds to see what others are tagging, which is a very cool feature and is a textbook example of a very powerful viral marketing technique.

My own experience and testing shows that 3.2% of all my web site traffic come from social bookmarking web sites, off those 50% come from http://Digg.com" title="http://Digg.com" target="_blank"http://Digg.com, 20% from http://Del.icio.us" title="http://Del.icio.us" target="_blank"http://Del.icio.us and the remaining 30% come from various bookmarking sites I am a member of. These sites include Furl and Stumble Upon.

As a search engine optimizer, social bookmarking is another tool I use to promote my web sites. An example would be, introducing a new developed web site. I could wait until Google, Yahoo and MSN found my web site naturally, but that would takes weeks if not months. I could join a link exchange network and exchange links with other web site and have the search engines find me that way. But, then again I would be relying on the indexabilty of the linking web site for the search engine to find me. Or I could add a couple of bookmarks on 3 of the most popular social bookmarking web sites. These large bookmarking web sites are indexed many times a day and the search bots are only looking for new content. Have a bookmark on a social bookmarking web site and could expect to be crawled by the big 3 within hours or at the most, within days.

To successful bookmarker, you need to supply good quality original content. Content that is going to be searched for and will solve a problem the searcher has. There is no point bookmarking content that no one wants. Spamming has become a major problem, but social bookmarking is controlled by it’s users. If the content you plan to bookmark is plain spam, the users of the bookmarking web site will just ignore it and move on. Your content will wither away and eventually be dropped out of the social bookmarking web site index.

If you social bookmark properly and supply good quality content, you can expect to gain dozens of quality back links as other bookmarkers, bookmark your content. This technique is a popular tool for successful search engine optimization and the best feature of social bookmarking is that it is free to use. I have not come across any social bookmarking web site that charges the user to use their facility.

Social bookmarking web sites are growing in popularity everyday. Find the ones that best fit the theme of your web site and bookmark with them. But remember, you will only succeed with bookmarking if you have content that is worth bookmarking.