As someone who works with small business website owners, I've heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In end, I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as five major ways of getting links.

* Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don't even try them.

* Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to program themselves to get a discount.

* Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they'll only have search-engine value a small percentage of time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.

* Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

* Other one-way incoming link strategies are in this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)

Now, on to five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

* Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.

* Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating link-dampening ambitions of Google and rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

* You need to have more than one website in same general category of interest or links won't be relevant.

Web Content Cost Considerations

When web content gets discussed on webmaster bulletin boards, most common question is, "how much should I pay?" That question is both perfectly logical, and perfectly misguided:

* Logical, because biggest expense of any website, with possible exceptions of advertising and promotion, is content. You only have to get web development and design once, but content needs to be added regularly for your site to be successful.

* Misguided, because real question isn't how much you are going to pay, but how much you are going to invest. Your content, if it's done right, will make you money. In fact, it can easily make back its cost within a month. So real question you should ask a web content provider is: how much will it make me?

Calculating Your Web Content's Value

Ultimately, your web content is one part of your site that makes you money. The code, design, and even traffic, while important, are not what ultimately get a visitor to take action. You have to tell or ask visitors to take action. Telling and asking take words.

Small changes in your web content can make big differences in bottom line. Take a look:

Advertising/affiliate revenue:

Let's say you have a web page that averages $25/day in revenue from advertising and/or affiliate links. You have a professional writer optimize content on page to get more clicks. Watch what happens:

1. If just 20% more visitors click on affiliate or advertising links, your revenue will increase $5/day, $150/month, and $1825/year. If your page maintains its current level of traffic for three more years, that's a $5475 increase, just for that one page.