There’s a couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use one of them.

1. You can pay other sites to link to you.
2. You can swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.

When I’m actively trying to get links, I only do number two. I’m told that number one works better than number two because one-way links are more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but I’ll tell you why I don’t care. First, though, a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link back to the other site.

The search engines value one-way links more highly because they figure it’s not just “artificial” link trading going on, but that somebody has given you a real live “vote” for your site without you asking for it–the greatest compliment.

Yes, one way links are more valuable. But I don’t care. Why not? First of all, as I said before, I don’t go after fiercely competitive keywords, so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to link to your site with one way links, and you won’t have to pay for those!

If you decide to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need to take to do it right:

1. Do a search at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Go to each page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.
3. Once you’ve emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see if they will link to you, too.

If it sounds like an enormous amount of work, that’s because it is. Well, it is if you do it all manually. But if you know me at all, you know that I hate to do things manually. I guess that’s the programmer in me coming out–I want to automate everything.

So how do I automate the process? How do I drive dozens or hundreds of in-bound links into my site without writing a manual email to thousands of webmasters? That brings me to the last section of this tutorial.