Back linking and inbound linking is crucial for increasing your site's PR, traffic and business. You can spend hours trying to make it happen, you can outsource or you can light upon just the right linking strategy for you. If you're going to out source it or do it yourself you'll need to know what's involved. So here are 15 tips to get you going!

15 Top Backlinking Tips

1. Getting links from sites with high PR and relevant content because that's what Google likes best.

2. Do some research on your keywords - what is the competition like for the keywords to get you on the first page of Google? Is it worth the cost, time and effort? This answer will determine what you do next - focus on different key words, put marketing efforts into other areas?

3. Outsourcing to a reputable link builder who will have the systems set up to create back links through article marketing, forums, blogs and profile linking. You can find a good link builder by asking for referrals from business forums.

4. If Australian relevancy is important for your business and Google search results then make sure you get some quality .com.au link referrals.

5. Avoid link farms as they'll only do you damage.

6. Make it easy for others to cross promote and linking to you by having a blurb they can copy that includes the links and description you want.

7. Link your site in vertical and horizontal directories and portals and include a useful description. Vertical portals have a niche market interest group. Horizontal portals have a broad based audience - like Yahoo directories. Alexa can be a great source for finding portals, particularly vertical directories. Vertical portals will send you targeted traffic and Google recognises the relevancy of your link from a subject specific vertical directory.

8. If you're actively getting your ecommerce site listed in online shopping malls and shopping directories do an initial round of finding free or cheap directories to list in - make sure you set a budget and stick to it. Then if you have an affiliate program up and going do a second round of submissions to shopping malls and shopping directories where you recruit affiliate based malls to your affiliate program as well as submitting to any new free shopping mall portals. This method can quickly get you 100 backlinks from quality PR sites. Of course you can also submit to paid directories to if this suits your budget.

9. Have links based on both your URL as well as directly from prioritised keywords.

10. You can exchange links from not just your website but also your social media pages and your blog.

11. Purposely design and develop content that encourages backlinks and cross links from related industry sites and network with other businesses that share your traffic - your customers.

12. Write the content and articles on your site and blog with useful, key word headings that shares information that others would want to share - yes, article marketing from your own site where others link into your site and bring you traffic.

13. Empower others to contact you so they can tell you when they have linked to your site - the growing trend to make it impossible for others to contact you doesn't just limit the spammers it limits business opportunities, networking opportunities and growth opportunities.

14. Be open to trading links and have a strategy for doing it. This can include options such as a Links page, writing a blog post, a shout out in your social media pages, including in an article in your library or a See also link list on a content page.

15. Keep track of your backing efforts with a simple Excel database listing: Website, Name, Contact, Action, Comment, Social Media, Newsletter and any other key details you find useful. Give the file a useful name and make sure you include instructions for it's use at the top of the worksheet so you or staff can come back to it later and know exactly where you are with it.

Creating Backlink Friendly Content Help

Check out how to write fantastic headlines with the Copyblogger's advice on How to Write Magnetic Headlines - find out how easy it really is to do and what a huge difference to traffic it makes to have headlines that other's what to have linked from their website - becomes a win/win/win!