Building links to your site is one of those things that is far from glamorous. It can be downright mind numbing at times. But it is one of the primary reasons the sites ranked above you are there.
A strong backlink profile is crucial for any business trying to get customers through the search engines. Unless you have the budget to spend a ton of money on Pay Per Click.
Some great methods you may want to think about are:
- Guest posting
- Building Lenses or Hubs
- Posting to a few Article Directories
Guest Posting
If you’re a writer (ie you enjoy writing), the best method for building quality links to your site is through guest posting.
To do this, you approach a website owner and offer them an article written by you that they can publish on their site. At some point in the article there will be a link back to your site, possibly in the blurb.
The key to this is to follow that site for a while and see what they talk about. Make sure what you offer the owner is your highest quality work tailored specifically to their site and audience.
This works so well because you’re getting usually a pretty solid link from a site with a fair bit of authority and at the same time exposing your work to a wider audience. Done right, you’ll get far more benefit than merely the link.
Lenses or Hubs
Squidoo pages are called Lenses, Hubpages pages are called Hubs (bit of a tongue twister there).
The general idea is the same for both. You build an authority base on those sites by publishing great, useful content. The more you create and engage, the better return you’ll get. Think of them as social media for article marketing.
Article Directories
Like with the previous, only work with a few of the major article directories, like Ezine Articles, Buzzle, iSnare and Go Articles.
It’s best to pick one, build a strong author profile on it with lots of quality articles, then add another, etc. The resource box will link to your site, giving you a quality link.
Supercharged Linkbuilding
Now all that’s great, but the step most people leave out is the last one. You need to build links to the pages linking to your site. I could get into detail about how spam filters and trust rank work, but that’s for another time. Suffice it to say that if you aren’t linking to the pages that are linking to your site you’re wasting most of your effort.
Leaving aside everything else, if you don’t link to those pages, they’ll quickly drop out of the search engine index, completely negating all the work you did to craft it in the first place.
You’ll always have some lower quality articles (or can outsource some from places like Odesk). Use those to build links to the pages linking to your site. Post them to lower authority article directories, free blogs (WordPress, Multiply, Blogger, Posterous, etc), social bookmark them (Delicious, Stumbleupon, Jumptags), if appropriate, tweet about them, put them on Facebook, etc.
You can use Ping to handle a number of these tasks from one place. And if you integrate it with Hootsuite, it becomes easier still. But that’s a tutorial for another time.
Building links to the pages linking to you creates a powerful network of sites all linking to your site. You’re basically building an impenetrable moat around your rankings. Anyone using tools to check your backlinks often won’t understand how you can be ranked higher than them with less links. The secret is that you will have higher quality links than them.
There’s many more ways to build links to your site, but this should give you plenty to get started on. I’ve used them to garner a lot of first position rankings. Many people only ever need to use these.
Go forth and link 
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