As any experienced webmaster will tell you the search to increase traffic to their website is a never ending one. Acquiring backlinks to your website is a great way to increase your traffic but as webmasters gain internet marketing experience they quickly realize that getting someone to provide a quality link to their website is no easy task.

There are a number of link building services on the internet geared towards "automating" your link building campaign, or promise "1000's of backlinks to your website instantly".

I have tried many of these services during my first steps in online advertising and have made a few conclusions about what these sites actually provide:

• Sites in these exchanges are generally brand new or of low quality. Ask yourself, do you see CNN or Google available for a link exchange at these sites?
• Links pages for the sites in these exchanges are uncategorized search engine SPAM. Ask yourself, how valuable is a link from a page with 100's of other un-related links on it to your business? There are exceptions to any rule but my experience has shown that there are very few "valuable" links to be gained from a link exchange site. The time you spend searching for these few golden nuggets would be better spent adding content to your website.
• Links pages are either not linked from the home page or are buried so deep in the site linking architecture that they are virtually unfindable. You aren't going to see very much traffic from that.
• A massive burst of backlinks to your website is a red flag with the search engines and may cause you to drop in the rankings actually reducing the traffic to your website, the exact opposite affect you originally wanted.
• Your email inbox is full of link request SPAM from the link exchange site. More often than not it is a waste of time to even view the site requesting the exchange. People seem to be more concerned with page rank in a link exchange than the actual traffic potential or content relevancy of the link and that's misguided at best.

It may be a good idea for a brand new website to join a link exchange to get a few relevant backlinks to their site if other quality sites from the same industry are available for an exchange but for an established business I would steer clear of this strategy.

Remember, Nothing is Free

Nobody is going to give you a valuable link on their website for free. It is like taking money out of their pockets and handing it too you just because you sent them an email asking them too.

A webmaster that has built up their website to the point where you would like to see your link on their site has done their homework and hard work to be the desireable link partner that you see.

If you are not working diligently at making your website link worthy through original content, a unique tool, or a valuable service then I'm afraid you are going to have a hard road building quality backlinks. If you really want to climb to the top of the search engine rankings you will have to have people link to your website unsolicited.

Ask yourself, should I be spending 8 hours a day mining up and sending link requests just to have them rejected because my site is no good? Wouldn't that time be better invested in improving your website so that you are the one being solicited for exchanges?

Fact: High quality, high traffic websites (ie. where you want your link to be) have no need or desire to trade or silicit links to their site.

While they may purchase a few strategic links to boost their search engine rankings or increase their overall site traffic you will not find too many information hubs that seek out reciprocal links. The fact is they can sell that "linkspace" as advertising so why would they reduce their earning potential to help you out?

Great Ways to Get Unsolicited Backlinks

The good news is that it is not all doom and gloom building links. You simply need to arm yourself with the right tools and then actually do the work.

• Write articles in your field of expertise and publish them in article directories with a link to your site in the author resource box.
• Directory Submissions
• Post in Forums in your industry. A great way to build relationships, links and referrals.
• Write a Blog about your industry and run the blog from your domain. Suggested Blog Software - Wordpress
• Run a Topsites or Banner Exchange in your industry. These types of exchanges have a small banner that must be placed on member websites to track statistics. You can include a link to your site in this button code. This method is not applicable to all industries and may hurt your credibility in some.
• Offer a unique tool or service from your website. Preferrably a free one. Provide HTML form code so webmasters can insert your tool into their websites if possible.
• Run a niche links directory with categories related to your main website topic and link it to your home page with the name "partners" or "resources". You will get a lot of SPAM from unrelated sites that you will have to reject but you will get a few golden nuggets. You will also find that many sites will place the reciprocal link on their site and not remove it even if you reject them since most links manager scripts will check for your reciprocal prior to accepting a link request into the database for approval. I have worked out a number of side deals with websites after they solicited a reciprocal links request. I may not have liked the links page they offered to place my link on, but I know they are interested in an exchange and if they have a webpage that suits my site better strategically I will send them an email. They may reject your request but it sure beats "cold calling" webmasters through email. Remember to make your links directory attractive and easy to find with some form of built in search if possible.

You will notice that all of my suggestions for ways to build quality backlinks require work on your part to implement. Sorry there is no way around this, as it should be.

About the Author:

Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for SEO Web Guide. Providing professional Search Engine Optimization services.