Building High-Quality Backlinks to your Website
Visualization is important in promoting your website the same way as it is important in any other important project. When promoting your website I have found that it is helpful to visualize it as a city, with each backlink being a road to your site. The more roads, or links to your site, the more ways there are to reach your virtual city, your world wide web site. every link is another strand of the spider web, so to speak.
You want your site to be a busy intersection on the information superhighway, as it were. So how do you accomplish this lofty goal? Well I think you should first focus on what cities focus on to become popular. If your site has rich content, other sites will link to you naturally. A city becomes popular because of what it has to offer, its features, it's infrastructure. The online equivalent is content. An article directory, for instance, is rich in content that people need and want, thus many other sites will either link to the article directories homepage or an individual article page within the site. There could be hundreds or thousands of these kind of incoming links. A big directory such as DMOZ or Wikipedia attracts incoming links in much the same way, by offering useful content.
Many other sites offer some sort of free service or offering, such as a free keyword suggestion tool, site popularity checker and so on. Other sites offer free software downloads, templates or tutorials. You get the idea. Of course you can also build your own inroads, although this method is a little bit more time consuming.
There are a lot of ways to "artificially" build these inroads or offramps to your site. A traditional method is to submit your website to web directories such as Yahoo and dmoz as well as the smaller free and niche directories that are out there like The Great Directory . You can get a lot of links using this method, literally hundreds, as a matter of fact. There are many free and cheap web directories these days. An average directory will have anywhere from one to fours thousand active sites or so, yet not all of them will necessarily be good quality ones so you will want to be selective.
Forums are another popular method. The way it works is you register for a popular forum such as sitepoint for free. Then you add your url in the 'edit signature' section. Then you just post to the forum naturally, and your signature will appear automatically with every post that you do. Every time you post, you get a free backlink, like magic. This is really one of the easiest methods, but be careful to only post where relevant or you may get kicked out of the forum or perhaps even flamed.
You can obtain perhaps the highest quality inbound links from article writing. essentially, you choose a topic that is related to your website's subject matter, which necessarily is probably something you know about, or your site would not be what it is. Then you a write an article of several paragraphs about that particular topic. When you submit your article to the individual article directories, you will be able to include a byline or resource box with your website link in it. Then each time someone uses your article, they are compelled to include your byline. This qualifies as viral marketing.
