One of the factors search engines use to rank a site is the number of links pointing to it. The assumption is, the more people reference a site, the more authoritative it is, and the more likely it will have the relevant information a searcher is looking for. Here are some of the best tips to start you off with your SEO linking strategy.

1. Submit your links to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, reddit, or digg.
2. Put bookmark links on your page to allow users to easily submit your sites to reddit or twitter.
3. Politely ask other bloggers if you can exchange links on each others’ blogroll.
4. You can also ask them if you can write at their blogs as a guest. Don’t forget to link back to your own site.
5. Use social media (twitter, FaceBook) to jump start linking.
6. Use Flickr; generate interesting images and illustrations that link back to your site.
7. You can also start blogs and link back to your site.
8. Ask if your employees, family or friends maintain their own sites. Ask them if they can link to your site too.
9. Get your own host so you can access information only found in web server logs (these are not usually available with free blog hosts, for example).
10. Look out for 404s – this usually means a user stumbled on your site from an outside link but didn’t get what he wanted. A filename may have changed.
11. It is a lot better if links going into your site come from unique domain names.
12. Use forum signatures to link back to your site.
13. Comment intelligently on other blogs. Although comments generally use a no-follow attribute, you can still get other people interested and they might link to your site from their own.
14. See which sites link to your competitors and find out if you can convince them to link to your site as well.
15. Have patience. Search engines will not immediately index your site overnight.
16. Use adwords or similar ad networks and bid on your own keywords.
17. When you see that a site directs a lot of traffic to your site, ditch the middleman altogether and contact the site directly for an advertising gig.
18. Nor will your page rank increase within a day of your campaign. Give the results a month or so to sink in then measure it.
19. Start a contest or a survey that gives out real prizes (an ebook is a real prize). Other people will link to your site quickly.
20. As much as possible, use text links.
21. Put links at both your headers and footers.
22. Use a Sitemap. That way you can be sure that all your pages are reachable and therefore indexable.
23. You can also use breadcrumbs. Not only do they make life easier for your readers to find out where they are in relation to your site structure, it is a great way to reference your own site links.
24. If you’re using a blog, add a widget that will display post archives.
25. And lastly, quality content naturally attracts other people to read, and ultimately link back to it.

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