I am sure that most people who have a website are looking into ways to help them to attract more people to read their site. There are many differing opinions on the best way to go about doing this but one thing that most people agree on is that it is essential to build up the number of backward links that point to your site. The question is how do we obtain these links?

It is always best to try to get other websites from the same industry as your own to add a link to your site on their site (on the homepage if possible). This is not as easy as it might seem as most of these people will be reluctant to do so. I have, in the past, spent hours phoning and e-mailing the webmasters from different sites which are in a similar field to my own site. Even when only one person agreed to my request after phoning up thirty people, I was happy. Hopefully this link will be permanent and over time could prove very valuable to me.

People who visit this persons site are now potential visitors to my own site as they may see my link and of course hopefully will click on it. In general the more links I am able to obtain the better, and in time I may well see an increase in my websites page rank. This in turn should move me up a few places in the search engines for my keywords, which of course should then result in more traffic.

This is the value of any backward link. If the page where my link has been added is a high traffic page or has a high page rank value then I am even more fortunate. As an example the link would be of far greater value to my site if it was placed on a page with a page rank five rather than a page with a page rank two.

How many backward links should I be aiming to obtain?

In my humble opinion you have to be careful not to build up the number of these backward links too quickly. It should be an ongoing project throughout the life of the website. If as an example you are able to obtain ten every week for five years, this would be superb. Where it can go wrong is if you obtain:

ten in week one

none in weeks two, three and four

three hundred in week five

none in weeks six, seven and eight

two hundred in week nine

This is very irregular and weeks five and nine suggests you have purchased a whole bundle of links. This could quite easily raise a red flag with the search engines.

There is no quick fix, hard work pays off and we all need to have patience. I always look to the long term and believe in time the work I put in today will be of great benefit to me tomorrow.

Other ways of obtaining links is by:

Writing articles

Purchasing a text link ad

Out of these two options I prefer the writing articles option. It can be quite boring to write these articles in some peoples opinion and in a way I agree. As I have already stated however, hard work pays off and this is a simple way of gaining one-way backward links. I try to ensure that each article that I write is informative and offers the reader some hopefully good advice. On average I probably write seven articles per week promoting different websites.