On December 22, Newsday printed an article “Links Can Help Drive Traffic to Your Web Site,” by Jamie Herzlich, in which EGC was quoted on how content is very important when it comes to getting others to link to you. This is one very important aspect of getting sites to link back to you, but as you can imagine there are many other ways to get links to your site.

1. Leverage your existing network of associations, memberships, affiliations and suppliers to get them to link over to your site. Many of them would be more than happy to do it, but some will have policies against it.
2. Distribute press releases and articles that are relevant to your business. These releases and articles will be picked up by other sites and ultimately link back to you. Just make sure you include source information.
3. Develop a content rich blog that is regularly updated. Other sites might reference you in their blogs and people will use it as a resource. It allows for others to link to you without sending their users directly to a company website.
4. Use social networking to build a following which will in turn direct people back to your site. You can use LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or any of the social networking sites to build the right community for you.
5. For any events or speaking engagements you might be involved in make sure there is a bio about you and your company and they link from the event website back to your site.

There are some things about link building that you should be very careful with. For one thing, link farms or companies that say that they will get you hundreds or even thousands of links, are probably too good to be true. Be very wary of any kind of offer that will provide you with a lot of links easily. It is better to go for quality, because a higher quality site is better than a lot of sites with poor quality. Finally, link-building is not easy and it is something that you need to continually work on. It is important that you are constantly on top of it and don’t try to game the system for link-building because in the end it might just end up hurting you with regard to search engines.