Let’s step out of our normal way of thinking and consider what the major search engines ultimately are trying to accomplish. They want to provide the best and most accurate search results to website visitors. We are a select few people (SEO) that want to manipulate those results – and we often times do a pretty good job at doing that.

The search engines want to give top rankings to websites that “appear” to be growing naturally!  With that said, how can we convince the search engines of natural growth? Technically, a truly reliable website will have links from all sorts of resources! They will receive links from Forums, Home Pages, Site Sub pages, Blog Posts, Blog Rolls, Articles, Press Releases, Directories, Social Media and I believe in reciprocal linking right now as well! Reciprocal linking has helped my company obtain a top 10 ranking for Professional Search Engine Optimization in Google.

Now, let’s consider the best ways to obtain links from each of these resources!

• Well, you could knock out two at once by exchanging links on your home page with another quality website similar in nature. I have seen tremendous growth using this tactic.
• You can post in Forums with your link in your signature! I recommend posting in several different forums using unique signatures on each.
• Ask to guest post on related blogs, present yourself as a professional in your industry.
• Ask to be listed on Blog Rolls of relevant websites, but do it in a non-intrusive way!
• Write and distribute articles and press releases to popular and free websites such as EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, Buzzle, PRLog, IdeaMarketers and some industry specific websites.
• Exchange links, but make sure to only link to quality websites that are not doing anything suspicious. Google warns against excessive link building, don’t do it!
• Obtain directory links – only from high quality directories!
• Social media is a tricky one! You want people to index your website content that actually are active in Social Media – because their links will be much more valuable often times on sites like Digg and Propeller!

I hope that this guide helped, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my post!

Joel McLaughlin

DataFlurry Professional SEO Consultants