You can have the best web content, sales copy, or product deals available online but without steady targeted traffic youre dead in the water.

One way to get increased online traffic to your website is to secure high quality inbound links pointing to your web site. This is perhaps the most important factor in attaining high search engine rank in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Of course your pages need to be filled with relevant, stimulating content but that is a seperate topic in itself.

The major search engines consider link popularity as a basis for ranking web pages so your linking strategies are very important. Developing a linking strategy that generates a high volume of targeted traffic will take time and effort but will be well worth the effort as the result will be increased online traffic.

Two effective strategies for gaining inbound links are article writing and link exchanges. Both of these methods are very adequate means of generating plenty of traffic, without spending a dime.

Article writing should be focused around one keyword which relates to a topic on one of your internal web pages. Use your main keyword or keyphrase in the anchor text of the article resource box that contains a link pointing back to your website. There are many article directories supporting many topics of interest all over the web, you will need to submit your articles to these.

The other strategy - link exchange - is a very effective strategy of gaining inbound links. It mainly consists of taking a keyword that is relative to your website or web page and copying the off page factors of the highest ranking websites for that particular keyword or phrase. Then you will optimize your page using these off page criteria as a template for your website. The off page criteria of the top ranked web sites you will need to analyze are :

- Which web sites link to it
- The number of websites linking to it
- The Google page rank of the website linking to it
- Page title of the website linking to it
- Anchor text used in the link linking to it
- And a number of other criteria.

This method is solid SEO and will take time and energy but stick with it! The pay off is big and you will be way ahead of most webmasters who quit or get sidetracked into ineffective strategies to increase traffic. Finding quality link partners should be a top priority for any affiliate marketer or e-business.

There is software that will easily compile all of these offpage factors and systematically choose the best linking partners for you. It is possible to do this all manually however it will take substantially more time.

Nonetheless, it is critical to follow through the process and choose QUALITY link partners.

These two methods, article writing and link exchanges will surely reward your website with increased online traffic, when done alone or simultaneously.