For optimizing Search Engine Placement and driving referral traffic, getting links to your business or ministry site is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, despite the critical need for this, many Webmasters don't even know how to check the links they currently have, much less how to get more.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools, then you know that you can just log in and check these stats from your Dashboard. Google Webmaster services are all free, and I highly recommend that any Webmaster sign up for a Google account in order to get them. Find more info here.

If you don't have a Google account, but would like to check what sites are linked to yours, you can do so by just entering the following on Google - link: yoursitename.com

See below for an example:

What returns is a list of Websites which have links back to your site. For a lot of Webmasters, that will be an eye opening experience.

The reason in-bound links matter is simple: inbound links are considered a vote of confidence or an indication that a highly-linked site is somehow better than one with less links. The assumption is that each link was added by someone maintaining a site - or writing a blog entry - that found the content worthy of recommendation. This is the simple, core idea behind Google and all its fancy algorithms.

But, how can you get links?

In this blog, I'll suggest a few of the ways that I do it, primarily using orthodoxbiz.com as an example. Since launch in October 2007, Orthodox Biz has managed to acquire 210 links. That's a really good amount of attention for a site with a marketing budget of zero dollars.

So how did we go about getting there?

First of all, trade! Several high-traffic Orthodox websites use Orthodox Biz as an eNewsletter platform. This is normally a service for paying members, but I was willing to trade services for links as part of the overall marketing plan. Find Webmasters you can work with and trade links, either in exchange for hosting their links or some other service.

By the way, I much prefer this to link exchanges or using link farms. Link farms are those annoying pages that have nothing but links to other sites which are there for no apparent rhyme or reason. The only purpose of such a site is to have an ever-increasing database of links. Search Engines frown on that and with good reason.

Also, I rely on in-bound links not just for Google ranking, but also for driving direct traffic. (You can easily see this in a daily breakdown of unique visitors below.)

No one sits there and clicks around on sites that are nothing but pure links with little or no organization. To me, it's a waste of money and energy to work with them. In addition, I like to have links to my sites on places that people who are interested in my content are likely to gather. All the way around, I like to decide with whom I co-operate. That's another reason why I don't trust Google Adsense on any but a few of my sites.

While I skip link farms, I work with legitimate directory sites all the time like Orthodox Links. Orthodox Biz is, in fact, at its core a directory site with good content. Obviously, I believe in this method. The links on a directory site are organized, and usually have some underlying theme that makes them coherent and useful for helping Web users find what they are looking for. Therefore, search engines tend to like them.

So, find the legitimate directory sites out there for your ministry or marketspace and sign up. These sites frequently have extremely good Google Page Rank, and can really help you drive traffic to your site!

The next thing to do is write content that people want to link to. This is, after all, how this is supposed to work. I've emphasized this point before, but it bears repeating - write things that are unique enough, fresh enough, and interesting enough to get people to link to them on their blogs and Websites. If you simply throw a static site out there, or if you only recycle news/commentary from other sites, then you will not attract much attention.

Originality sells.

A classic example of this was a piece I did called, Noted Orthodox Christian Author Clark Carlton Endorses Ron Paul for President. I wrote the blog because I was interested in the topic and wanted to call attention to it, but once I did then it was off to the races. The article got picked up by dozens of sites, and generated thousands of visits. It also got 11 Diggs, and over a month after it ran is still one of the biggest draws on the Orthodox Biz site. Ron Paul was hot, the presidential election was in the news, and I rode that wave for all that it was worth.

Did I write this just to get attention? No, but if you pick good topics and do a good job with them then attention will follow. That is my biggest piece of advice on getting noticed - write good content that people want to recommend to others, refer to in their own writings, and discuss on discussion forums.

Of course, that isn't the advice for people are looking for. That is the technological equivalent of telling overweight people to eat right and get exercise. Many people aren't looking for a solution that involves real work, which is why fad diets that promise you can lose 20 lbs by eating Doritos and watching TV are so popular. As are companies that tell you if you buy the right system from them, you can get 10,000 visitors a day to your Internet site with little or no effort.

Search Engines, however, are getting better all the time at spotting manipulation, so if you follow the advice of some company pushing a way to purely game the system, then be prepared for such methods to stop working at anytime. Today's sure-thing can land you in the penalty box tomorrow.

One last bit of advice - find something to give away. Maryjean Zarick is a harpist and author. She was looking for away to increase traffic on her Website to increase the chances of selling her books, and to increase registration for her eNewsletter. So she put a download on her site of a harp version of Stairway to Heaven and started advertising on harpist forums, Orthodox Biz, etc.

Next thing you know, harpists were flocking to her site to get sign-up for the free download. Last time I checked, she'd scored over 400 new registrations that way, and that is in a niche space.

Imagine what a hot download could do for you? Giving away stuff to drive traffic isn't exactly a new idea, but it always surprises me that more online businesses don't try the same approach that has been a staple of retailing for years.

Of course, Maryjean has a Joomla-powered site that came bundled with user registration and a file download manager. If you have a static site that doesn't support downloads, then partner up with a site that does and may be use eNewsletter registrations or some other trigger to provide a link to the file.

Where there is a will, there is a way!

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. You can contact him here

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 [Getting Links to Your Website or Blog: Rating in Google Where It Counts]

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