If you were to ask knowledgeable web designer or hosting company about what would be most helpful in increasing the amount of traffic that their web site gets, I believe that one of the most common answers is that they would like to have more links (also known as "backlinks") to their site. This is because links are valuable for two reasons:
1. People surf the web by clicking on links. Thus every link to your web site offers an opportunity to get more visitors. One prominent link on a busy web site, can bring a lot of visitors. Most links of course are not quite as effective as that, and will only bring a trickle of extra visitors, but remember, every little bit counts, and the cumulative effect of many ordinary links can be quite large.
2. Search engines are increasingly take the number of links to a web site into account as part of their ranking algorithms. Thus getting more links to your site can boost your ranking, and this in turn can mean that your site gets more visitors from search engines.
If you want to increase the number of backlinks to your site, here are four methods that you can use:
1. You can provide lots of interesting and unique content on your site that people will people will want to link to (this type of content is known as "link bait"). Of course, there is no guarantee that people will actually link to you, so this method is not enough by itself.
2. You can exchange links with other web sites. This works fairly well, but it can be time consuming, since you need to spend time find sites to swap links with, and then additional time filling in those site's link exchange forms and updating your own link page. However, there are software available that allow you to automate much of this process, and build up a lot of link exchanges quickly.
3. You can submit your site to directories. There are over 1,000 directories that will accept free submissions, but in order to submit to each one you need to fill out that particular directory's submission form. I'd suggest you invest in directory submission software, and you can this job done quickly. We use Web Position Gold and it is a really good tool.
4. In the long run, the best way to build up backlinks is to write articles and submit them to article directories. Each article can include a link back to your site in the "resource box", and since there is no limit on the number of articles you can write, you can keep doing this on an ongoing basis, ideally making writing and submitting articles part of your regular working routine. To get the best results from each article, you should submit to as many article directories as possible, however since there are hundreds of article directories, doing so manually would be virtually impossible. Once again software rides to the rescue - invest in article submission software, and this task also becomes very easy.
