Free Links: These are links like Directory submissions, forum signatures, blog comments, social bookmarking ect. These are good when you are just starting your site, that’s about it though in my opinion. I use these type of links to say “Hey google, I got a site, check it out!”

When you buy a link package at a webmaster forum, you are most likely getting free links from the sources above. Don’t waste to much money on these types of links, Yeah they are links but on a scale of 1 to 5 they are definitely a 1 when it comes to ranking for a keyword.

The second types of links we have are Paid links, these are hard coded links on a website. The key is to find these links on website that are related to yours. Look for websites that have your keyword in their content, ideally you can get that keyword in their content linked to your website. If not a link on the site with the content is good also. You can normally get a link for around $10 a month which isn’t bad, if you get a link on a popular site it can boost your rankings and bring you some targeted traffic.

So you’ve found a link on a site, and are in contact with the owner. How do you judge how good this link is? Check out how many back links the site has. The more back links the linking site has the better! It’s like popularity, having a friend that is semi-popular in the same click will make you more popular, but having a friend in the same click that is really popular boost your popularity even more. You can check backlinks using a tool such as http://backlinkwatch.com

I hope this helps some of you save some money and get good quality links to your website.

Step one is to find a long-tail keyword. This is a keyword that is 3-4+ words long. For example “Using article directories to promote your blog”. T his is a really long one, but it gives you the basic idea. Write your post about this topic, and set the keyword in your post title. It works good to have your blog permalinks setup like www.yourblog.com/this-is-the-post-title/. I have noticed the search engine likes it when the keyword is somewhere in the address bar. So now you have your blog post, keyword in title and relevant content in the post body. Don’t forget to use the keyword and similar ones in the post body and make them bold to make sure the search engine knows what keyword your post is about.

Now to rank for this long-tail keyword is pretty easy. Create yourself an eZineArticles.com account, and while you’re at it create yourself a GoArticles.com account. Now write another article with the same article topic, and the same type of content. It is best to re-write a unique article. Write as many articles as you want, two almost guarantees you first page if you have a decent blog authority already, and the keyword isn’t super competitive. (It’s best to choose long-tail keywords that aren’t really competitive.) Post one article to eZineArticles.com, same idea as the blog post put your long-tail keyword in the title. Now in the resource box of eZineArticles.com write your keyword in a link like so: <a href=”http://blog.com/link-to-post-kwhere” title=”kwhere”>Long-tail Keyword Here</a>. And that will be a good quality link to your blog post thus bringing it up in the search engine.

Now if you use GoArticles.com or many other article directories you can post the link right in the article body, use the same technique and make the link text be the actual long-tail keyword.

I hope this helps some of you bring your traffic to your individual posts up a tid-bit.