Published Free Reprintble Articles
By far the best results here. I’ve submitted them to several article directories and have picked up the majority of my backlinks from here. I continue to release new ones bi-weekly
Provided RSS Feed
Have an rss feed for all the articles and ping 50 RSS agregates with each new release.
Submitted to Directories
Hired someone to do this and have picked up about 50 links this way, but haven’t seen any traffic from them and I don’t the the SE’s are picking up the majority of them.
Link Trading
Hasn’t worked out too well. About 1 in 10 agree to trade links and is very time consuming.
Press Releases
Have released three press releases through PRWeb at varying levels. They show 30,000 to 100,000 views per release but that didn’t translate into much traffic. I think I only picked up one backlink each from this because all the consumers link to the article on PRWeb which links to me.
Free Tools
Created a Javascript credit card payoff calculator and submitted it to all the scripting sites. Average about 5 visitors a day from this and pick up a new backlink everytime someone ads it to their site. I’d do more tools, but can’t think of any others related to my site.
Yahoo Directory
Haven’t payed for this because my category has three pages of results already. Don’t think it would help much.
Other Paid Directories
I’ve paid for these with other sites, but it didn’t really work out so I didn’t do so with this one.
Open Directory
Submitted about 2 months ago and sent in the 30 day status check. I’ll check every six months for the next 6-8 years until I get listed.
Forum Signatures
Use them on sites that allow it.
Blog Spam
I’ve refrained from this one.. You’re welcome…
Cross Linking from other sites
Have about 45 of my own sites linking to this one (most are very low traffic/links/pr).
On Site Content
Shane – yes I have put quite a bit of work into optimizing my site content as well. I have my home page to what I think is the perfect criteria, but I’m still really new to this. The rest of the pages are descently optimized, but I haven’t put as much work into them. Looking forward to getting some external verification. I’ve asked on other sites but just go “looks good” type of responses.
Join Organizations that allow site linking
I haven’t really found any that let you specify your link text, it just shows up as a link to my site with http://www.mysite.com as the link text. My understanding is this doesn’t help at all for SEO.
Buy Advertising
I assume you’re referring to PPC. This is just two expensive for my terms (credit card related) to be profitable, and wouldn’t really help my natural search rankings. If you meant pay for inclusing sites, I don’t know of any sites that are worth it. I’m opent to suggestions though
Research who is linking to your competition
I have done this and that is the list I used for my link trading solicitations.
Write Testimonials
I had seen this one before, but it’s the same problem with them not allowing to specify your link keywords, just http://www.mydomain.com
Award Program
Good idea, but my credit card related site wouldn’t be well suited for this.
Freebies
Someone on another forum suggested this and I think I will do it. I could give away $100 prepaid credit card and get links from several free directories and probably get a high numer of signups for a newletter. The only problem is these links go away when the offer expires. Probably still worth it though.
Link to Us Note
I have a link directory page for similar sites which I have an option to submit your site to for a link exchange. Have picked up 4-5 links with it so far in the past 4 weeks.
Make donations
This is a great idea and I know someone who paid $50 to support an open source project and picked up a perminant on topic PR6 link from it. I have tried to find similar ones related to my site, but haven’t found any yet.
Affiliate Program
I thought I’d throw this one in. I haven’t forgot about it, I’m just not in a position to offer one just yet.