Building a web site is only the first step in a long process when starting an online internet business. You need traffic to your web site and the best way to get traffic is through incoming links from other sites.

Incoming links come in a variety of forms. Some rank higher in quality than others as far as the search engines are concerned. The major search engines, Google included will rank your site higher in their listings depending on the amount of quality incoming links you have from other sites. At the time of writing this article it appears that incoming links that do not require you to link back are of better quality than reciprocal linking which does require you to link back.

One of the ways to get quality incoming links to your site without linking back is to submit your site to as many directories as you can. The top 2 directories are Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. But there are literally hundreds more directories that you can submit your site to for free. You can find a few directories on my blog at the following link. Submit Your Site To Directories.

Another way to get good quality incoming links without linking back is to use and take part in as many discussion groups and forums as you can. Make sure you us the signature feature and add a link to your website using your targeted keywords in the signature. Each time you post in a forum you will be leaving behind a link to your web site.

The next topic require a bit of work on your part but writing articles like this one can create hundreds if not thousands of incoming links to your web site. At the bottom of this article and all other articles that I write I leave a bio or about the author section. In this section I have links to my websites. I post these articles everywhere in article databases and e­mail it to newsletter publishers in the hopes that they will use my article in their newsletter and or web site. This is so popular right now that the pros are saying if you are not doing it you need to be. Writing articles is difficult at times but it’s well worth the effort.

Next make sure you have a way for people to link back to you naturally. Place a link on your site somewhere that says link to us and include instructions on how they should link to you. If you have informative content and update it regularly, people will link to your site automatically.

Last but not least there is always reciprocal linking. Reciprocal links require a link back to the site that is linking to you and as I mentioned earlier these links do not carry as much weight as far as the search engines are concerned. But reciprocal links are still a very valuable advertising and search engine optimization technique that should not be ignored. There are a couple rules that one should follow when using reciprocal links. First make sure you have already added the link to the other site before you ask for a link back. And make sure your link page’s have no more than 50 links per page. When using any of the above linking strategies it is very important that you use your targeted key words in the link and not just your web site URL. The search engines read the text between the tags to determine what your site is all about. If your site is about green leopard frogs then you should use green leopard frogs in your title and between the tags.

Tom Worsley is a successful work from home Internet marketer and independent representative for Strong Future International (SFI), Owner and Webmaster for http://kawarthapublishing.com.