Creative Ways to Gain Links

Creative Methods for "One Way" Links

Everyone knows the importance of getting other sites to link to you and the most common way is for a reciprical link. That is the kind of link that Click Sentrys reciprical tools address. These are great links and should always be sought after. However, there has been much discussion about Google giving less weight to a link that is recip. One of the ways to combat this is "triangle" linking but this can be very time consuming and hard to explain to new website owners. That brings us to another method:

One Way Linking

When most people think about one way linking their mind immediately turns to directories. These are a great source (and are seemingly endless) of one way links but there are even more creative ways to get them. I am going to break it into two very easy categories - Press Releases and Article Submissions

Press Releases - New websites seem to believe that people who need their service or product will just find them because of that need. Anyone who has started a site just to sit back and let the orders or visitors roll in has been quickly reminded that despite being the "web", people still need to know you are there.
There are plenty of great sites that allow you to "announce" your arrival. Even if you are an established site you are still able to write a press release to announce any new products or tools you may have. Somehow in the move from newspapers to internet many have lost the fine art of writing an engaging (and self serving of course) press release. I will write another article sometime about that lost art with step by step instructions. In the meantime, just read some of the other Press Releases and adapt your own. These press releases are spidered by google so it is a great way to not only get a link but to also drive traffic to your site.

Here are some sites to start with:

http://www.prleap.com
: Your free press release goes to google news(news.google.com) and searchengines like yahoo, msn altavaista and you can view the history and statistics.
For this release, your article must be professional.

http://www.prweb.com:
One of the best press release websites i come across. You can issue free press release which goes to related websites and article posting websites.
For a fee of 60+ only, your article goest to various news sites like yahoo news, business.com(iam not sure of this) and related big news websites.

Article Submissions - The second great way to gain links is to submit articles. Do you have a web design site? Write an article about Google starting to index flash sites. All of the good submission sites allow you to put an about the Author section with links to your site in it. This gives you an instant link from the site you submitted it to but MORE IMPORTANTLY, these sites allow other website owners to boost their content by including YOUR article in their websites. The only thing they ask is for the article and your link to not be modified. Write a good article and you may see 100's of one way links within weeks. Write 10 great articles and.... well you get the idea.

Here are some sites to start with:

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com

Good Luck!!

About the author:
Jason Rickard is the webmaster of http://www.yourfavouriteshop.com and owner of http://www.graftonwebdesign.com.