Free traffic does NOT come free. You have to take very informed steps if you’ll enjoy high quality traffic from the search engines and other sources. This brings us to the question of the “how” of doing it.
There are onsite and offsite factors that determine whether you’ll rank high for the keyphrases you target or not. But of them all (those that we are sure of), getting high quality links to your site happens to be the surest way of ranking high for your chosen keywords. Let’s look at some ways to get those links…
1. Piggy-back on sites that have built a reputation by submitting your articles to article directories. This is a very effective link-building method. Furthermore, you can do it without spending a dime.
The strongest advantage of article submission, from a link-building point of view, is that you determine your anchor text. You decide what your anchor text says and this means that you decide which keywords you get ranked for.
Now, some people think that they can submit just a few articles and have first page ranking. While this may happen in some low competition niches, you’ll need to submit many articles to reap the rewards. The more competitive your niche is, the more articles you’ll have to submit.
Just make sure you have the right tools for this or you’ll be wasting your time and money. Some services help you submit unique versions of each article to each article directory. This increases the effectiveness of your efforts and gets you as many as 500 to 1,000 permanent links for each article you submit through them.
2. Start blogging on similar themes to your main website niche. All you’ll then do is link to your site each time you make a post.
Lack of money is certainly NOT an excuse to postpone starting your own blog. You only need to have what you want to say. Just make sure it’s some useful and relevant to your theme. You can start within a few minutes for free at either blogger.com or wordpress.com.
Do you have to start a blog to build links with them? No. You can easily build many high quality links if you make useful comments on other people’s blog. Just make sure they “do follow” and that you link back to your site.
3. Make sure you bookmark your articles on sites like digg.com and del.icio.us. Also give your visitors the opportunity of bookmarking your articles. These are quality links to your site.
The other advantage of social bookmarking is the leverage you can get. If you have great content some of your visitors will bookmark your articles. People who check their bookmarks will also visit your pages and some will add you to their own bookmarks. This helps you enlist others to do your link building for you.
4. Web directories are great sources of high quality inbound links. There are free directories and there are also paid ones.
If you must submit your site to only one directory, then make it Dmoz.org. A link from this site is worth a lot. However, you’ll do yourself much good by submitting to as many web directories as will give you a rank boost (And they are many).
Do NOT limit yourself to just the big directories. Search in your niche. Although niche directories might NOT have very high page rank, their links are very useful because they are theme-focused.
You can make your work a lot easier by using a directory submission service or software. It’s up to you to decide what your time is worth and how much such a tool or service will save you.
5. Search for forums in your niche. Visit them and post useful comments (of course with a link to your site). Make sure you add value to these forums and you’ll get the most out of this strategy.
Although we’ve touched many ways to build links to your site, they are NOT the only ways. But just bear in mind why you’re building links: It’s to drive massive free and residual targeted traffic to your site.

