Perhaps the goal of any website owner is to drive traffic (and in the real of real estate - convertable prospects) to your page. Perhaps the top way to do that from a broad based audience is through gaining positions in the search engines - namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s no secret that Google is the king of the hill right now - driving much more traffic than Yahoor or MSN. It’s also no secret that links play a big part in Google rankings.

Essentially when a website links to yours, it casts a “vote” for your website. The more votes, the more popular your website is seen. Now, this is a greatly simplified view as Google supposedly uses over 50 different calculations to rank your site, but linking is a big part of it.

The goal in linking is to obtain a solid 1-way link from a website that has some authority in your subject to your site. Reciprocal linking (I.E. - putting a link to a site on your page in return for a link to your page from theirs) is now considered a redundant form of linking because search engines have been devaluing those links. So, since obtaining one-way links is considered much more valuable in terms of search engine rankings, it’s worth a look at some of the ways you can obtain one way links to your site.

There are several well-known ways of getting one way links to your site:

• submit your site to paid or free directories
• write articles about your subject and release them to various article sites
• write press releases about your business and release them to various PR sites
• attract natural links through “link bait” or other tactics
• sponsor wordpress or link directory themes
• pay for links

Some of these are more valuable than others and over the next few posts, I’m going to be talking about each of these methods - how they’re done and how you can start doing them.