Links are one of the most important ways to bring traffic as they enhance the search engine ranking and bring organic traffic to the site. Following is the list of ways to improve links.
1. Link exchange: Exchange the links of your site to other site owners. You can send them a request personally. Your link will be placed on their site in exchange for the link on your site. You can search the web for keywords of your niche and get a list of sites specialized in your niche. Then you can request for link exchange. However many webmasters (especially from high-ranked sites) avoid exchanging links from related sites as they take it as competition. Targeting sites having complementary content is better than targeting competitive content. You should communicate properly to convince those giving details of your website. Alternatively, you can add their link first before asking them to do so. Based place to put the links are sidebar. Here your partner will be convinced that their links are getting wider publicity. The links placed at unrelated sites are not good for AdSense ads as traffic coming in this way reduces the cost of each click (CPC).
2. Blog and forums: Blogs and forums allow commenting from visitors and subscribers. They also allow leaving your links and signature lines. Find the appropriate blog and forums (on your niche) and read their contents before commenting. You should avoid junk comments and use them only as a way to improve your links. If you do so there are chances that you will be banned from those blogs and forums. Quality comment is the price you for getting your link there. If you have good comments people will be convinced to visit your site.
3. RSS: It is one of the easy ways which allow readers to keep coming back. RSS feed contains a list of recent articles (with or without content). It is very easy to add RSS to web browsers (like Mozilla) and other feed readers (like NewzCrawler etc)
4. Pings: Pings are a way to inform search engines that you have posted something new. Sites like Pingomatic offer a pinging facility. You should regularly ping your site. Blogging software like WordPress allows automatic pinging.
5. Sharing option for articles/ viral marketing: You should always have the option to share the link via various ways like email, social networks, etc. Whenever a person likes the content of the article, they can send it to their friend. The sharing option gives a link and places it in email or social profiles. These links can easily be used to visit your content. This type of marketing is viral in nature. It can be used to target millions of people in a short time.
6. Allow commenting: People love to see their writing. If you allow them to comment on the articles, they will visit again and again to see the comments. They will also send articles to their friends to show them those comments. Also, they will be subscribed to see responses to the comments, which facility can easily be provided by most blogging platforms.
7. Guest blogging: You can request sites in your niche for guest blogging. Just write a few quality articles and publish them. In exchange for your article, they will allow adding links to your site in the content.
8. Article directories and banks: Several article directories offer publication of the articles. You can submit articles there with links in the contents. You can also add a byline. There is no rule that an article should be original and unique. If you are the writer of the article and own the copyright then you can submit it to those directories. Unique content is better but not necessary. You can use any of the articles published on your site for submission. It quickly increases the number of links which in turn improves your PageRank. Some software can automatically submit a particular article in several article directories. Many professional agencies also offer the article submission facility.
9. Links in newsletters: A newsletter is a way to inform your subscribers about new articles and new features on your site. You can add many other things as well. You can easily add various links to your newsletter. It helps to bring readers again and again to your site. A site like http://www.constantconversions.com provides a facility to write newsletters and a site like http://www.aweber.com can be used to send it. You can always write a title and brief about it with a read more option at the end while writing a newsletter. Google feedburner can also be used to send notifications about new posts. At present Google allows putting AdSense ads in the newsletters. Therefore it has revenue generation potential.
10. eBooks and other information guide: People like quality content. If it is free then nothing is better than this. As your site is specialized on a particular topic, you can easily write an eBook or other information guide. You can give the option to download it from your website. You don’t need to accomplish extraordinary feats to create such content. You can gather a few articles from your website. Just put it together and make it in the form of an eBook. But don’t forget to add relevant links to the content of this eBook. People will follow those links. Such eBooks will be circulated throughout the web via emails and other means. Whenever new readers come in contact with these contents, it will entice them to visit your site. It will increase the traffic to your site.
11. Links to the profile page of social networks: Nowadays social networks work like viruses. It spreads any link to the whole world in a short span. Social networks like FaceBook, Orkut, MySpace, etc have many groups joined by people of similar interest. You can search for relevant groups and place your site links there so that such targeted people can visit your site. Here you can personally communicate with people who are interested in your niche area. You can even personally convince them to visit your site. Alternatively, you can start a new group in your niche. The user list will grow soon and then you can start marketing your site there.
12. Link exchange at a fee: Some sites offer exchanges of links between sites at cost. If you are interested you can visit http://www.linkmetro.com, http://www.adzaar.com, http://www.adbrite.com, and http://www.linkadage.com.
13. Inter-connected sites: You can build more sites and interconnect them by giving links to various places. It also increases the overall stay time of the visitor to your web content. Longer stay time has a better probability of higher CTC.
14. Quality content: All of the above-described methods need your involvement. But if you have quality content in your niche then many of the related sites will automatically add your links to their sites. They put your links as they think your site content is useful for their visitors.
Now you have the knowledge of how you can improve the number of links to your site, it is also very important to know where your links are on the web. Google Search Central is a free online tool to analyze links.