Best Sites to Get Incoming Links for your Website

The Office Live blog offers some good advice on where businesses can go to gain some incoming link juice. Excerpts.

• Social networking sites in your industry.   Unless you’re targeting a particular demographic, you can waste a lot of time pursuing links from such sites as YouTube and Facebook, says Osmeloski. A better bet is a social networking site within your industry (such as Gusto.com in the travel industry), she says. "Social networking sites are growing in each industry." If you find the right one, contribute to its knowledge base with a thoughtful article or commentary, and include a link to your site.
• Professional, industry, and trade associations. A link from the association’s site to yours may be included in your membership fee. If not, submit your URL and ask that a link be included, write an article for the association site, or even pay for an ad.
• Web directories.   Yahoo Directory and Business.com are two reliable places for high-quality links, Thurow says. Both require annual submission fees. If their links don’t offer a boost to your site’s link development, she says, don’t renew.
• Noncompeting sites in your niche.  out sites that complement yours—a travel agent, for example, should hook up with bed & breakfast and currency exchange sites, among others. Contact owners of the most appealing sites and offer to write an article, Seda says. Include a byline and link to your bio; the spiders will notice.
• Press release services with archives.   Newswires such as PRWeb and Newsforce can help you get your message out. For a fee, they can provide keywords that boost your press release’s visibility on news engines such as Yahoo News and, in turn, on general search engines. Expect to spend $70 or more per release. Be aware: Your press release must be considered newsworthy. Also: Not every press release service archives releases. "Long-term storage is what you want," says Thurow.

From Office Live Blog.