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Last week we looked at the hypertext link as the most basic unit of information on the web. To recap, the 2 parts of a link are the web address and the reason a reader should visit the site pointed to by the link. This reason to visit is in the clickable anchor text.

This week we're going to examine free and low-cost ways to get incoming links to your site, blog, or social site pages such as HubPages and Squidoo Lenses. The reason for promoting our sites into at least the top 3 search engine results is that they get well over 95 percent of all the clicks. From number 4 on down your site is almost invisible.

Why do you need incoming links to your site? Incoming links bring viewers while making your site more visible in the search engine results pages. This improved ranking comes from what's known as link popularity- similar to having many friends. More links means more link popularity, resulting in a better SERPs ranking.

What a lot of people don't know is that the Page Rank, (PR), of the site sending the link plays a very large role in determining your site's visibility. PR is similar to the social ranking of a pillar of the community. This referral carries more weight than most.

Every site begins as an unknown voice in the wilderness. Getting into the search engines is as simple as getting one link from a site that is already indexed. It may take anywhere from a few hours to a week or more, depending on how often the search engines spider the referring site.

Your own free BlogSpot, WordPress, Facebook, Hubpages, Digg, or other big name social site accounts are quick, free, and fairly high value linking sources.

Writing articles such as this and submitting them to article sites is another way to build authority status and gain links. Paying for promotion speeds the process up significantly.

I highly recommend it paying a few dollars to promote an article for a month to get it to the top of Google and MSN, sometimes even Yahoo. These links work fast in Google; the longevity gets your article to the top of MSN in many cases.

My experience with IdeaMarketers.com is that the article tops Google for search terms that aren't extremely competitive in around one or two days. They tend to top MSN in less than two weeks.

And they have staying power. Once your articles have topped the search engines they require almost no ongoing promotion to retain those top rankings. You should also find lots of copies also ranking well, multiplying the number of incoming links that you get.

Press Releases are another excellent link-building source. They go for anywhere from free to several hundred dollars. A promotional budget of $500 invested at PRWeb.com, for instance, guarantees your press release gets picked up by Google News, Yahoo News, API Newswire, the blogosphere, and gets you SEO visibility. Your message literally becomes front-page news, and the resulting two to three day traffic surge is truly incredible to behold.

Now you know the mechanics of getting to the top of the search engines without the time, expense, and confusion that seems to be associated with search engine optimization. In our next installment we'll dig into the meat of finding the lucrative keywords that can bring you a predictable flow of high quality prospects while still being realistic for quick, low-priced number one rankings.