Getting other websites to link to yours is one of the most time-consuming and essential tasks that any Internet marketer must face. Linking campaigns can be boring, repetitive, and, if done correctly, incredibly successful!

Within the Internet marketing world we call these links to our websites "Inbound Links", and they are important to your website for two reasons:

1. Inbound links bring traffic – whenever a website has a link to yours, a certain percentage of their traffic will visit your website. The amount of traffic each link generates is usually quite small, but as you build more and more links, the number of visitors can become significant.

2. Inbound links increase search engine awareness – the more links the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) see pointing to your site on the Internet, the more important they assume your website is. A website that has 10,000 inbound links will typically be ranked higher for it’s keywords than a site with only 20 inbound links.

There are many ways to get inbound links. Some cost money, and some are more effective than others. Following are 4 sure-fire methods of getting zero-cost inbound links. Implementing these will certainly help to improve traffic to your website.

Submit to Website Directories

Whenever I launch a new website, the first thing I do is register it on the web directories. Now, there are thousands of directories on the Internet, but only about 250 actually get traffic and count from a search engine optimization standpoint. Compiling the list was a painstaking process, but now that we have it, we’re able to really boost a new website into Google’s index pretty quickly.

You can submit your website to the free web directories, or you can have a service do it for you for. I will tell you that it is a boring and repetitive process to do yourself, and can take several days to a week to do 250 submissions.

Some web directories will offer enhanced listings for a small fee (usually under $20). These enhancements can be worth the money if you feel pretty sure your website will get valuable exposure or additional ad space included in the deal.

A few good website directories are: http://www.profitchoice.com/webdir (ours), http://www.dmoz.org (open directory project), and http://www.buzzle.com.

Submit Content to Article Directories

If you produce an online newsletter, then a really great way to get more exposure for your website is to submit your articles to online article directories. This process can be monotonous, but well worth the effort. Over time, I have compiled a list of about 100 article directories that do a good job of providing SEO-friendly links and decent turn-around time on their review cycles.

When you write an article for the article directories, you want to make sure that it is informative and newsworthy. Sales pitches are usually discarded before they are published, so make sure your content is valuable to a website publisher before you take the time to submit it. A couple good article directories are http://www.ezinearticles.com and http://www.goarticles.com.

RSS Feeds and Blogs

In addition to submitting your articles to article directories, why not create an RSS feed out of it as well? In addition to article syndication, Blogs are another form of content syndication that uses essentially the same format for distributing your content on other websites.

Once your feed is listed on the distribution sites, they will rescan your feed every few days and update the information in their databases. The beauty of RSS is that you don’t have to resubmit every time you add a new article.

A great piece of software that I use is called Feedforall (http://www.feedforall.com/). It helps you to create your RSS feed. All you have to do is paste your article information into the system, and it generates the XML for you. Last I checked, they have a free trial and the software costs about $40 to buy.

Your RSS feed can be distributed through a number of distribution sites. A few to get you started are: http://www.feedburner.com, http://www.syndic8.com, http://www.completerss.com.

Press Releases

One of my favorite methods of generating traffic to a website is through the use of press releases. Press releases can be free to create and distribute, and if a major media outlet picks them up, you can get a ton of traffic pushed into your site very quickly.

It is not unusual at all for a typical well-written press release to be picked up by hundreds or even thousands of other websites. The trick is to put out press releases regularly and make sure each one is newsworthy.

A great place to start is PRWeb’s website (http://www.prweb.com). They offer a free distribution service, or you can pay extra for their enhanced service that gets you better exposure to the search engines.

Getting Inbound Links Is Easy

In short, getting good quality inbound links to your site is pretty easy to do if you focus your efforts on activities that are most likely to succeed. Submitting your website and article content to directories and syndication services is an easy way to get links placed on thousands of websites very quickly.

To get more in-depth information on these and other Internet marketing techniques, visit http://www.profitchoice.com/7days and download our free online course, "7 Days to Website Success". The course provides detailed instructions and lists of websites you can use to dramatically improve your online results in just seven days.

Matthew Coers is an Internet marketing expert. His website, ProfitChoice.com contains FREE video tutorials and online courses designed to help entrepreneurs build a website and make money online.