At the very heart of how you promote your shiny new website online is the issue of links.

A couple of years ago the question of links was easily answered - just get more links than your competitors pointing at your website (assuming your website has reasonable content) and you’d get higher than them in the search engines. You could do link swaps, sitewide links and links on completely unrelated sites and it would get you the result you wanted.

All that is changing now though.

For a start, affiliate links (link swapping) no longer hold any clout with regards to how your site ranks in Google. It has been abused by the spammers and Google in particular does not give it the same emphasis that it used to.

Links from unrelated directories and spams sites similarly hold no clout. Usually your link is placed on a page with no pagerank and a hundred other links going who knows where. Save your energy and don’t bother with these either.

Sitewide links still hold a bit of clout in Yahoo, but not in Google. So, if you are buying a link from a website save your money and just buy a link on one page. Buying a link on every page might not bring the same rewards.

So how do you get good links?

First you’ve got to identify pages within sites that rank highly for the search term you want your site to rank for. This just takes research.

Next you have to contact the owner of that site with a personal email asking if they’d consider giving you a link from said page. Webmasters of popular sites get loads of these emails every day, so you need to make your request attractive. Try and find out the name of the person you are requesting the link from. Praise their site. Say something to let them know you’ve actually looked at their site. Then make your request. But you need to offer something in return.

So what can you offer in return for a link?

1. Cold hard cash. This is often the simplest option and generates lots of results, but doesn’t work in all cases. Anywhere from $10-$50 is average.
2.  Offer a discount voucher on your products. If you are selling online, offer a decent, one time discount voucher. Who knows, they might never use it but at least it will get you the link.

3. Offer a discount on services. Same as above.

4. Offer a free trial of your service, software, subscription etc. This is a great way to get links and spread buzz about your service.

If you don’t get a result, don’t despair and move onto the next site. Perseverance will pay off.

All in all, it is much harder to get links these days, and will cost you more, but keep to high quality related pages and a few links will pay you back much more than the 8,500 links you had listed in Yahoo in the bad old days.